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The 

American Occupation of 

the Philippines 



1898-1912 



By 
James H. Blount 

Officer of United States Volunteers in the Philippines, 1899-1901 
United States District Judge in the Philippines, 1901-1905 



With a Map 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 

Ube Umicfeerbocfeer press 

1912 



3 






Copyright, 1912 

BY 

JAMES H. BLOUNT 



ST- 



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£CLA3I6730 
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Go 

JOHN DOWNEY WORKS 



OF CALIFORNIA 

AS FINE A TYPE OF CHRISTIAN GENTLEMAN 

AS EVER 

GRACED A SEAT IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 

WHO 

BELIEVING, WITH THE WRITER, AS TO THE PHILIPPINES, THAT 

INDEFINITE RETENTION WITH UNDECLARED INTENTION 

IS 

INDEFENSIBLE DRIFTING 

HAS READ THE MANUSCRIPT OF THIS WORK 

AS IT PROGRESSED 

LENDING TO ITS PREPARATION THE AID AND COUNSEL OF 

AN OLDER AND A WISER MAN 

AND 

the contagious serenity of 
confidence that right will prevail 
this book is gratefully inscribed by 

The Author 



PREFACE 

Pardon, gentles all, 
The flat unraised spirit that hath dared 
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth 
So great an object. 

Henry V. 

TO have gone out to the other side of the world with 
an army of invasion, and had a part, however 
small, in the subjugation of a strange people, and then 
to see a new government set up, and, as an official of 
that government, watch it work out through a number 
of years, is an unusual and interesting experience, 
especially to a lawyer. What seem to me the most 
valuable things I learned in the course of that experi- 
ence are herein submitted to my fellow-countrymen, 
in connection with a narrative covering the whole of 
the American occupation of the Philippines to date. 

This book is an attempt, by one whose intimate 
acquaintance with two remotely separated peoples 
will be denied in no quarter, to interpret each to the 
other. How intelligent that acquaintance is, is of 
course altogether another matter, which the reader will 
determine for himself. 

The task here undertaken is to make audible to a 
great free nation the voice of a weaker subject people 
who passionately and rightly long to be also free, but 
whose longings have been systematically denied for the 
last fourteen years, sometimes ignorantly, sometimes 
viciously, and always cruelly, on the wholly erroneous 



VI 



Preface 



idea that where the end is benevolent, it justifies the 
means, regardless of the means necessary to the end. 

At a time when all our military and fiscal experts 
agree that having the Philippines on our hands is a 
grave strategic and economic mistake, fraught with 
peril to the nation's prestige in the early stages of our 
next great war, we are keeping the Filipinos in indus- 
trial bondage through unrighteous Congressional leg- 
islation for which special interests in America are 
responsible, in bald repudiation of the Open Door policy, 
and against their helpless but universal protest, a 
wholly unprotected and easy prey to the first first-class 
Power with which we become involved in war. Yet all 
the while the very highest considerations of national 
honor require us to choose between making the Filipino 
people free and independent without unnecessary delay, 
as they of right ought to be, or else imperilling the 
perpetuity of our own institutions by the creation and 
maintenance of a great standing army, sufficient 
properly to guard overseas possessions. 

A cheerful blindness to the inevitable worthy of Mark 
Tapley himself, the stale Micawberism that " something 
is bound to turn up, " and a Mrs. Jellyby philanthropy 
hopelessly callous to domestic duties, expenses, and 
distresses, have hitherto successfully united to prevent 
the one simple and supreme need of the situation — a 
frank, formal, and definite declaration, by the law- 
making power of the government, of the nation's 
purpose in the premises. What is needed is a formal 
legislative announcement that the governing of a 
remote and alien people is to have no permanent place 
in the purposes of our national life, and that we do 
bona fide intend, just as soon as a stable government, 
republican in form, can be established by the people 
of the Philippine Islands, to turn over, upon terms which 



Preface vii 

shall be reasonable and just, the government and con- 
trol of the islands to the people thereof. 

The essentials of the problem, being at least as im- 
mutable as human nature and geography, will not 
change much with time. And whenever the American 
people are ready to abandon the strange gods whose 
guidance has necessitated a new definition of Liberty 
consistent with taxation without representation and 
unanimous protest by the governed, they will at once 
set about to secure to a people who have proven them- 
selves brave and self-sacrificing in war, and gentle, 
generous, and tractable in peace, the right to pursue 
happiness in their own way, in lieu of somebody else's 
way, as the spirit of our Constitution, and the teach- 
ings of our God, Who is also theirs, alike demand. 

After seven years spent at the storm-centre of so- 
called "Expansion, " the first of the seven as a volunteer 
officer in Cuba during and after the Spanish War, the 
next two in a like capacity in the Philippines, and the 
remainder as a United States judge in the last-named 
country, the writer was finally invalided home in 1905, 
sustained in spirit, at parting, by cordial farewells, oral 
and written, personal and official, but convinced that 
foreign kindness will not cure the desire of a people, 
once awakened, for what used to be known as Freedom 
before we freed Cuba and then subjugated the Philip- 
pines ; and that to permanently eradicate sedition from 
the Philippine Islands, the American courts there must 
be given jurisdiction over thought as well as over 
overt act, and must learn the method of drawing an 
indictment against a whole people. 

Seven other years of interested observation from the 
Western Hemisphere end of the line have confirmed and 
fortified the convictions above set forth. 

If we give the Filipinos this independence they so 



^ 



viii Preface 

ardently desire and ever clamor for until made to shut 
up, ''the holy cause," as their brilliant young repre- 
sentative in the American House of Representatives, 
Mr. Quezon, always calls it, will not be at once spoiled, 
as the American hemp and other special interests so 
contemptuously insist, by the gentleman named, and 
his compatriot, Senor Osmena, the Speaker of the 
Philippine Assembly, and the rest of the leaders of 
the patriot cause, in a general mutual throat-cutting 
incidental to a scramble for the offices. This sort of 
contention is merely the hiss of the same old serpent 
of tyranny which has always beset the pathway of 
man's struggle for free institutions. 

When first the talk in America, after the battle of 
Manila Bay, about keeping the Philippines, reached 
the islands, one of the Filipino leaders wrote to another 
during the negotiations between their commanding 
general and our own looking to preservation of the 
peace until the results of the Paris Peace Conference 
which settled the fate of the islands should be known, 
in effect, thus: "The Filipinos will not be fit for 
independence in ten, twenty, or a hundred years if it 
be left to American colonial office-holders drawing 
good salaries to determine the question." Is there 
not some human nature in that remark? Suppose, 
reader, you were in the enjoyment of a salary of five, 
ten, or twenty thousand dollars a year as a government 
official in the Philippines, how precipitately would you 
hasten to recommend yourself out of office, and evict 
yourself into this cold Western world with which you 
had meantime lost all touch? 

The Filipinos can run a far better government than 
the Cubans. In 1898, when Admiral Dewey read in the 
papers that we were going to give Cuba independence, 
he wired home from Manila : 



Preface 



IX 



These people are far superior in their intelligence, and 
more capable of self-government than the people of Cuba, 
and I am familiar with both races. 

After a year in Cuba and nearly six in the Philip- 
pines, two as an officer of the army that subjugated the 
Filipinos, and the remainder as a judge over them, I 
cordially concur in the opinion of Admiral Dewey, 
but with this addition, viz., that the people of those 
islands, whatever of conscious political unity they may 
have lacked in 1898, were welded into absolute oneness 
as a people by their original struggle for independence 
against us, and will remain forever so welded by their 
incurable aspirations for a national life of their own 
under a republic framed in imitation of ours. Further- 
more, the one great difference between Cuba and the 
Philippines is that the latter country has no race 
cancer forever menacing its peace, and sapping its 
self-reliance. The Philippine people are absolutely 
one people, as to race, color, and previous condition. 
Again, American sugar and tobacco interests will 
never permit the competitive Philippine sugar and 
tobacco industries to grow as Nature and Nature's 
God intended; and the American importers of 
Manila hemp — which is to the Philippines what 
cotton is to the South — have, through special Con- 
gressional legislation still standing on our statute 
books — to the shame of the nation — so depressed the 
hemp industry of the islands that the market price 
it brings to-day is just one half what it brought 
ten years ago. 

If three strong and able Americans, familiar with 
insular conditions and still young enough to undertake 
the task, were told by a President of the United States, 
by authority of Congress, "Go out there and set up a 



x Preface 

stable native government by July 4, 1 92 1, 1 and then 
come away," they could and would do it; and that 
government would be a success; and one of the greatest 
moral victories in the annals of free government would 
have been written by the gentlemen concerned upon 
the pages of their country's history. 

We ought to give the Filipinos their independence, 
even if we have to guarantee it to them. But, by 
neutralization treaties with the other great Powers 
similar to those which safeguard the integrity and 
independence of Switzerland to-day, whereby the other 
Powers would agree not to seize the islands after we 
give them their independence, the Philippines can be 
made as permanently neutral territory in Asiatic 
politics as Switzerland is to-day in European politics. 

James H. Blount. 

1406 G Street, N. W., 
Washington, D. C, 
July 4, 1912. 

P. S. — The preparation of this book has entailed 
examination of a vast mass of official documents, as 
will appear from the foot-note citations to the page 
and volume from which quotations have been made. 
The object has been to place all material statements 
of fact beyond question. For the purpose of this re- 
search work, Mr. Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Con- 
gress, was kind enough to extend me the privileges of 
the national library, and it would be most ungracious 
to fail to acknowledge the obligation I am under, in 
this regard, to one whom the country is indeed fortunate 

1 The date contemplated by the pending Philippine Independence 
Bill, introduced in the House of Representatives in March, 1912, 
by Hon. W. A. Jones, Chairman of the Committee on Insular 
Affairs. 



Preface xi 

in having at the head of that great institution. I should 
also make acknowledgment of the obligation I am 
under to Mr. W. W. Bishop, the able superintendent 
of the reading-room, for aid rendered whenever asked, 
and to my lifelong friends, John and Hugh Morrison, 
the most valuable men, to the general public, except 
the two gentlemen above named, on the whole great 
roll of employees of the Library of Congress. 

J. H. B. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

Mr. Pratt's Serenade 1-15 

Spencer Pratt,, Consul-General of the United States, at 
Singapore, in the British Straits Settlements, finding 
Aguinaldo a political refugee at that place at the outbreak 
of our war with Spain, April 21, 1898, arranges by cable 
with Admiral Dewey, then at Hong Kong with his squad- 
ron, for Aguinaldo to come to Hong Kong and thence to 
Manila, to co-operate by land with Admiral Dewey 
against the Spaniards, Pratt promising Aguinaldo inde- 
pendence, without authority. Mr. Pratt is later quietly 
separated from the consular service. 

CHAPTER II 

Dewey and Aguinaldo 16-45 

After the battle of Manila Bay, May 1, 1898, Admiral 
Dewey brings Aguinaldo down from Hong Kong, whither 
he had proceeded from Singapore, lands him at Cavite, 
and chaperones his insurrection against the Spaniards un- 
til the American troops arrive, June 30th. 

CHAPTER III 

Anderson a:nD Aguinaldo 46-66 

General Anderson's official dealings with Aguinaldo from 
June 30, 1898, until General Merritt's arrival, July 25th. 

CHAPTER IV 

Merritt and Aguinaldo . . . . . . 67-87 

General Merritt's five weeks' sojourn in the Islands, from 
July 25, 1898, to the end of August, including fall of 
Manila, August 13th, and our relations with Aguinaldo 
during period indicated. 



xiv Contents 



CHAPTER V 

Otis and Aguinaldo 88-106 

Dealings and relations between, September-Decem- 
ber, 1898. 

CHAPTER VI 

The Wilcox-Sargent Trip 107-120 

Two American naval officers make an extended tour 
through the interior of Luzon by permission of Admiral 
Dewey and with Aguinaldo's consent, in October- 
November, 1898, while the Paris peace negotiations were 
in progress. What they saw and learned. 

CHAPTER VII 

The Treaty of Paris 121-138 

An account of the negotiations, October-December, 1898. 
How we came to pay Spain $20,000,000 for a $200,000,000 
insurrection. Treaty signed December io, 1898. 

CHAPTER VIII 

The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation- . . 139-151 

President McKinley's celebrated proclamation of Decem- 
ber 21, 1898, cabled out to the Islands, December 27, 
1898, after the signing of the Treaty of Paris on the 10th, 
and intended as a fire-extinguisher, in fact acted merely 
as a firebrand, the Filipinos perceiving that Benevolent 
Assimilation meant such measure of slaughter as might 
be necessary to " spare them from the dangers of" the 
independence on which they were bent. 

CHAPTER IX 

The Iloilo Fiasco ....... 152-163 

By order of President McKinley, General Otis abstains 

from hostilities to await Senate action on Treaty of Paris. f 

CHAPTER X 

Otis and Aguinaldo {Continued) 164-185 

Still waiting for the Senate to act. 

I 



Contents xv 



CHAPTER XI 

Otis and the War . 186-223 

Covering the period from the outbreak of February 4, 
1899, until the fall of that year. 

CHAPTER XII 

Otis and the War (Continued) ..... 224-269 

From the fall of 1899 to the spring of 1900. 

CHAPTER XIII 

MacArthur and the War ...... 270-281 

Carries the story up to the date of the arrival of the Taft 
Commission, sent out in the spring of 1900, to help 
General MacArthur run the war. 

CHAPTER XIV 

The Taft Commission 282-344 

Shows how the Taft Commission, born of the McKinley 
Benevolent Assimilation theory that there was no real 
fundamental opposition to American rule, lived up to that 
theory, in their telegrams sent home during the presi- 
dential campaign of 1900, and in 1901 set up a civil 
government predicated upon their obstinate but oppor- 
tune delusions of the previous year. 

"The papers 'id it 'andsome 
But you bet the army knows." 

CHAPTER XV 

Governor Taft — 1901-2 345-402 

Shows the prematurity of a civil government set up under 
pressure of political expediency, and the disorders which 
followed. 

CHAPTER XVI 

Governor Taft — 1903 403-436 

Shows divers serious insurrections in various provinces 
amounting to what the Commission itself termed, in one 



xvi Contents 



instance, "a reign of terror" — situations so endangering 
the public safety that to fail to order out the army to 
quell the disturbances was neglect of plain duty, such 
neglect being due to a set policy of preserving the official 
fiction that peace prevailed, and that Benevolent Assimi- 
lation was a success. 

CHAPTER XVII 

Governor Taft — 1903 (Continued) 437~445 

Shows the essentially despotic, though theoretically be- 
nevolent, character of the Taft civil government of the 
Philippines, and its attitude toward the American busi- 
ness community in the Islands. 

CHAPTER XVIII 

Governor Wright — 1904 446-498 

Shows the change of the tone of the government under 
Governor Taft's successor, his consequent popularity 
with his fellow-country men in the Islands, and his 
corresponding unpopularity with the Filipinos. Shows 
also a long series of massacres of pacificos by enemies 
of the American government between July and Novem- 
ber, 1904, permitted out of super- solicitude lest ordering 
out the army and summarily putting a stop to said 
massacres might affect the presidential election in the 
United States unfavorably to Mr. Roosevelt, by reviving 
the notion that neither the Roosevelt Administration nor 
its predecessor had ever been frank with the country 
concerning the state of public order in the Islands. 

CHAPTER XIX 

Governor Wright — 1905 ...... 499~5i4 

Shows the prompt ordering of the army to the scene of 
the disturbances after the presidential election of 1904 was 
safely over, and the nature and extent of the insur- 
rections of 1905. 

CHAPTER XX 

Governor Ide — 1906 . 515-523 

Describes the last outbreak prior to the final establish- 
ment of a state of general and complete peace. 



Contents 



xvn 



CHAPTER XXI 

Governor Smith — 1907-9. . 

Describes divers matters, including a certificate made 
March 28, 1907, declaring that a state of general and 
complete peace had prevailed for the two years immedi- 
ately the preceding. Describes also the formal opening of 
First Philippine Assembly by Secretary of War Taft in 
October, 1907, and his final announcement to them that 
he had no authority to end the uncertainty concerning 
their future which is the corner-stone of the Taft policy 
of Indefinite Tutelage, and that Congress only could 
end that uncertainty. 



524-557 



CHAPTER XXII 

Governor Forbes — 1909-12 

Suggests the hypocrisy of boasting about " the good we 
are doing" the Filipinos when predatory special interests 
are all the while preying upon the Philippine people even 
more shamelessly than they do upon the American 
people, and by the same methods, viz.: legislation 
placed or kept on the statute-books of the United States 
for their special benefit, the difference being that the 
American people can help themselves if they will, but the 
Philippine people cannot. 



558-570 



CHAPTER XXIII 

Non-Christian" Worcester 

Professor Worcester, the P. T. Barnum of the "non- 
Christian tribe" industry, and his menagerie of certain 
rare and interesting wild tribes still extant in the Islands, 
specimens of which you saw at the St. Louis Exposition of 
1903-4; by which device the American people have been 
led to believe the Igorrotes, Negritos, etc., to be samples 
of the Filipino people. 



571-586 



CHAPTER XXIV 

The Philippine Civil Service 

Showing how imperatively simple justice demands that 
Americans, who go out to enter the Philippine Civil 
Service should, after a tour of duty out there, be en- 



587-594 



xviii Contents 



titled, as matter of right, to be transferred back to the 
Civil Service in the United States, instead of being left 
wholly dependent on political influence to "place" 
them after their final return home. 



CHAPTER XXV 

Cost of the Philippines 595 -6o 3 

In life, and money, together with certain consolatory 
reflections thereon. 

CHAPTER XXVI 

Congressional Legislation \ 604-622 

Showing how a small group of American importers of Ma- 
nila hemp — hemp being to the Philippines what cotton is 
to the South — have so manipulated the Philippine hemp 
industry as to depress the market price of the main 
source of wealth of the Islands below the cost of pro- 
duction; also other evils of taxation without representa- 
tion. 

CHAPTER XXVII 

The Rights of Man 623-632 

Industrial slavery to predatory interests and physical 
slavery compared. 

CHAPTER XXVIII 

The Road to Autonomy 633-646 

Shows how entirely easy would be the task of evolving the 
American Ireland we have laid up for ourselves in the 
Philippines into complete Home Rule by 1921, the date 
proposed for Philippine independence in the pending 
Jones bill, introduced in the House of Representatives 
in March, 1912. 

CHAPTER XXIX 

The Way Out 647-655 

Shows how, by neutralization treaties with the other 
powers, as proposed in many different resolutions, of both 



Contents xix 



Republican and Democratic origin, now pending in 
Congress, whereby the other powers should agree not 
to annex the Islands after we give them their indepen- 
dence, the Philippines can be made permanently neutral 
territory in Asiatic politics exactly as both Switzerland 
and Belgium have been for nearly a hundred years in 
European politics. 

Index ............. 657 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

The Capture of Aguinaldo, March 23, 1901 — 
The Central Fact of the American Military 
Occupation ..... Frontispiece 

From the Drawing by F. C. Yohn 
Copyright by Charles Scribner's Sons 

Bird's-eye View of the Philippine Archipelago, 
Showing Preponderating Importance of Luzon 228 

Outline Sketch of the Theatre of Operations 
in Luzon, 1899 ...... 232 

Sketch Map of the Philippines . . At End 



The American Occupation 
of the Philippines 



CHAPTER I 
Mr. Pratt's Serenade 

Had I but served my God with half the zeal 
I served my king, he would not in mine age' 
Have left me naked to mine enemies. 

King Henry VIII., Act III., Sc. 2. 

ANY narrative covering our acquisition of the 
Philippine Islands must, of course, centre in the 
outset about Admiral Dewey, and the destruction by 
him of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on Sunday 
morning, May 1, 1898. But as the Admiral had 
brought Aguinaldo down from Hong Kong to Manila 
after the battle, and landed him on May 19th to start 
an auxiliary insurrection, which insurrection kept the 
Spaniards bottled up in Manila on the land side for 
three and a half months while Dewey did the same by 
sea, until ten thousand American troops arrived, and 
easily completed the reduction and capture of the be- 
leaguered and famished city on August 13th, it is 
necessary to a clear understanding of the de facto alliance 
between the Americans and Aguinaldo thus created, to 



2 American Occupation of Philippines 

know who brought the Admiral and Aguinaldo together 
and how, and why. 

The United States declared war against Spain, April 
21, 1898, to free Cuba, and at once arranged an under- 
standing with the Cuban revolutionists looking to co- 
operation between their forces and ours to that end. 
For some years prior to this, political conditions in the 
Philippines had been quite similar to those in Cuba, so 
that when, two days after war broke out, the Honorable 
Spencer Pratt, Consul- General of the United States at 
Singapore, in the British Straits Settlements, found 
Aguinaldo, who had headed the last organized outbreak 
against Spain in the Philippines, temporarily sojourning 
as a political refugee at Singapore, in the Filipino colony 
there, he naturally sought to arrange for his co-operating 
with us against Spain, as Gomez and Garcia were doing 
in Cuba. Thereby hangs the story of "Mr. Pratt's 
Serenade." However, before we listen to the band 
whose strains spoke the gratitude of the Filipinos to Mr. 
Pratt for having introduced Aguinaldo to Dewey, let us 
learn somewhat of Aguinaldo's antecedents, as related to 
the purposes of the introduction. 

The first low rumbling of official thunder premonitory 
to the war with Spain was heard in Mr, McKinley's 
annual message to Congress of December, 1897, z 
wherein he said, among other things: 

The most important problem with which this govern- 
ment is now called upon to deal pertaining to its foreign 
relations concerns its duty toward Spain and the Cuban 
insurrection. 

In that very month of December, 1897, Aguinaldo 
was heading a formidable insurrection against Spanish 

1 Congressional Record, December 6, 1897, p. 3. 



Mr. Pratt's Serenade 3 

tyranny in the Philippines, and the Filipinos and their 
revolutionary committees everywhere were watching 
with eager interest the course of "The Great North 
American Republic," as they were wont to term our 
government. 

The Report of the First Philippine Commission sent 
out to the Islands by President McKinley in February, 
1899, °f which President Schurman of Cornell Univer- 
sity was Chairman, contains a succinct memorandum 
concerning the Filipino revolutionary movement of 
1896-7, which had been begun by Aguinaldo in 1896, 
and had culminated in what is known as the Treaty 
of Biac-na-Bato, x signed December 14, 1897. This 
treaty had promised certain reforms, such as represen- 
tation in the Spanish Cortez, sending the Friars away, 
etc., and had also promised the leaders $400,000 if 
Aguinaldo and his Cabinet would leave the country 
and go to Hong Kong. "No definite time was fixed," 
says President Schurman (vol. I., p. 171), "during 
which these men were to remain away from the Philip- 
pines; and if the promises made by Spain were not 
fulfilled, they had the right to return." Of course, 
"the promises made by Spain" were not fulfilled. 
Spain thought she had bought Aguinaldo and his crowd 
off. "Two hundred thousand dollars," says Prof. 
Schurman, "was paid to Aguinaldo when he arrived in 
Hong Kong." But instead of using this money in 
riotous living, the little group of exiles began to take 
notice of the struggles of their brothers in wretchedness 
in Cuba, and the ever-increasing probability of inter- 
vention by the United States in that unhappy Spanish 
colony, which, of course, would be their opportunity to 
strike for Independence. They had only been in Hong 
Kong about two months when the Maine blew up 

1 Split Rock. 



4 American Occupation of Philippines 

February 15, 1898, Then they knew there would be 
"something doing. " Hong Kong being the cross-roads 
of the Far East and the gateway to Asia, and being only 
sixty hours across the choppy China Sea from Manila, 
was the best place in that part of the world to brew 
another insurrection against Spain. But Singapore is 
also a good place for a branch office for such an enter- 
prise, being on the main-travelled route between the 
Philippines and Spain by way of the Suez Canal, about 
four or five days out of Hong Kong by a good liner, and 
but little farther from Manila, as the crow flies, than 
Hong Kong itself. Owing to political unrest in the 
Philippines in 1896-7-8, there was quite a colony of 
Filipino political refugees living at Singapore during 
that period. Aguinaldo had gone over from Hong 
Kong to Singapore in the latter half of April, 1898, 
arriving there, it so chanced, the day we declared war 
against Spain, April 21st. He was immediately sought 
out by Mr. Pratt, who had learned of his presence in 
the community through an Englishman of Singapore, a 
former resident of Manila, a Mr. Bray, who seems to 
have been a kind of striker for the Filipino general. 
Aguinaldo had come incognito. Out of Mr. Pratt's 
interview with the insurgent chief thus obtained, and 
its results, grew the episode which is the subject of 
this chapter. 

A word just here, preliminary to this interview, 
concerning the personal equation of Aguinaldo, would 
seem to be advisable. 

While I personally chased him and his outfit a good 
deal in the latter part of 1899, in the northern advance 
of a column of General Lawton's Division from San 
Isidro across the Rio Grande de Pampanga, over the 
boggy passes of the Caraballa Mountains to the China 
Sea, and up the Luzon West Coast road, we never did 



Mr. Pratt's Serenade 5 

catch him, and I never personally met him but once, 
and that was after he was captured in 1901. He was as 
insignificant looking physically as a Japanese diplomat. 
But his presence suggested, equally with that of his 
wonderful racial cousins who represent the great empire 
of the Mikado abroad, both a high order of intelligence 
and baffling reserve. And Major-General J. Franklin 
Bell, recently Chief of Staff, United States Army, who 
was a Major on General Merritt's staff in 1898, having 
charge of the " Office of Military Information," in a 
confidential report prepared for his chief dated August 
29, 1898, " sizing up" the various insurgent leaders, in 
view of the then apparent probability of trouble with 
them, gives these notes on Aguinaldo, the head and 
front of the revolution: " Aguinaldo: Honest, sincere, 
and * * * a natural leader of men." 1 

Any one acquainted with General Bell knows that he 
knows what he is talking about when he speaks of "a 
natural leader of men," for he is one himself. Our 
ablest men in the early days were the first to cease 
considering the little brown soldiers a joke, and their 
government an opera-bouffe affair. General Bell also 
says in the same report that he, Aguinaldo, is undoubt- 
edly endowed in a wonderful degree with "the power of 
creating among the people confidence in himself. " He 
was, indeed, the very incarnation of "the legitimate 
aspirations of" his people, to use one of the favorite 
phrases of his early state papers, and the faithful inter- 
preter thereof. That was the secret of his power, that 
and a most remarkable talent for surrounding himself 
with an atmosphere of impenetrable reserve. This 
last used to make our young army officers suspect him 
of being what they called a "four-flusher," which 
being interpreted means a man who is partially suc- 

1 Senate Document 62, p. 381. 



6 American Occupation of Philippines 

cessful in making people think him far more important 
than he really is. But we have seen General Bell's 
estimate. And the day Aguinaldo took the oath of 
allegiance to the United States, in 1901, General Mac- 
Arthur, then commanding the American forces in the 
Philippines, signalized the event by liberating 1000 
Filipino prisoners of war. General Funston, the man 
who captured him in 1901, says in Scribners Magazine 
for November, 191 1, "He is a man of many excellent 
qualities and * * * far and away the best Filipino I 
was ever brought in contact with." 

Aguinaldo was born in 1869. To-day, 1912, he is 
farming about twenty miles out of Manila in his native 
province of Cavite; has always scrupulously observed 
his oath of allegiance aforesaid; occasionally comes to 
town and plays chess with Governor- General Forbes; 
and in all respects has played for the last ten years with 
really fine dignity the role of Chieftain of a Lost Cause 
on which his all had been staked. He was a school- 
teacher at Cavite at one time, but is not a college grad- 
uate, and so far as mere book education is concerned, he 
is not a highly educated man. Whether or not he can 
give the principal parts of the principal irregular Greek 
verbs I do not know, but his place in the history of his 
country, and in the annals of wars for independence, 
cannot, and for the honor of human nature should not, 
be a small one. Dr. Rizal, the Filipino patriot whose 
picture we print on the Philippine postage stamps, and 
who was shot for sedition by the Spaniards before our 
time out there, was what Colonel Roosevelt would 
jocularly call "one of these darned literary fellows." 
He was a sort of "Sweetness and Light" proposition, 
who only wrote about "The Rights of Man," and 
finally let the Spaniards shoot him — stuck his head in 
the lion's mouth, so to speak. Aguinaldo was a born 



Mr. Pratt's Serenade 7 

leader of men, who knew how to put the fear of God 
into the hearts of the ancient oppressors of his people. 
Mr. Pratt's own story of how he earned his serenade is 
preserved to future ages in the published records of the 
State Department. * We will now attempt to summar- 
ize, not so eloquently as Mr. Pratt, but more briefly, 
the manner of its earning, the serenade itself, and its 
resultant effects both upon the personal fortunes of 
Mr. Pratt and upon Filipino confidence in American 
official assurances. 

It was on the evening of Saturday, April 23, 1898, 
that Mr. Pratt was confidentially informed of Agui- 
naldo's arrival at Singapore, incognito. l ' Being aware, " 
says Mr. Pratt, "of the great prestige of General 
Aguinaldo with the insurgents, and that no one, either 
at home or abroad, could exert over them the same 
influence and control that he could, I determined at 
once to see him/' Accordingly, he did see him the 
following Sunday morning, the 24th. 

At this interview, it was arranged that if Admiral 
Dewey, then at Hong Kong with his squadron awaiting 
orders, should so desire, Aguinaldo should proceed to 
Hong Kong to arrange for co-operation of the insurgents 
at Manila with our naval forces in the prospective 
operations against the Spaniards. 

Accordingly, that Sunday, Mr. Pratt telegraphed 
Dewey through our consul at Hong Kong: 

Aguinaldo, insurgent leader, here. Will come Hong 
Kong arrange with Commodore for general co-operation 
insurgents Manila if desired. Telegraph. 

Admiral Dewey (then Commodore) replied: 

Tell Aguinaldo come soon as possible. 

1 See pages 341 et seq., Senate Document 62, part I, 55th Cong., 3d 
Sess., 1898-9. 



8 American Occupation of Philippines 

This message was received late Sunday night, April 
24th, and was at once communicated to Aguinaldo. 
Mr. Pratt then did considerable bustling around for 
the benefit of his new-found ally, whom, with his aide- 
de-camp and private secretary, all under assumed names 
he "succeeded in getting off, " to use his phrase, by the 
British steamer Malacca, which left Singapore for Hong 
Kong, April 26th. In the letter reporting all this to the 
State Department, Mr. Pratt adds that he trusts this 
action "in arranging for his [Aguinaldo' s] direct co- 
operation with the commander of our forces" will meet 
with the Government's approval. A little later Mr. 
Pratt sends the State Department a copy of the Singa- 
pore Free Press of May 4, 1898, containing an impressive 
account of the above transaction and the negotiations 
leading up to it. This account describes the political 
conditions among the population of the Philippine 
archipelago, "which," it goes on to say, "merely 
awaits the signal from General Aguinaldo to rise en 
masse. " Speaking of Pratt's interview with Aguinaldo, 
it says : 

General Aguinaldo's policy embraces the independence 
of the Philippines. * * * American protection would be 
desirable temporarily, on the same lines as that which might 
be instituted hereafter in Cuba. 

Mr. Pratt also forwards a proclamation gotten up by 
the Filipino insurgent leaders at Hong Kong and sent 
over to the Philippines in advance of Admiral Dewey's 
coming, calling upon the Filipinos not to heed any 
appeals of the Spaniards to oppose the Americans, but 
to rally to the support of the latter. This manifesto 
of the Filipinos is headed, prominently — for all we know 
it may have had a heading as big as a Hearst newspaper 



Mr. Pratt's Serenade 9 

box-car type announcement of the latest violation of 
the Seventh Commandment — : ' ' America ' s Allies . ' ' 
It begins thus: 

Compatriots: Divine Providence is about to place 
independence within our reach. * * * The Americans, 
not from mercenary motives, but for the sake of humanity 
and the lamentations of so many persecuted people, have 
considered it opportune * * * etc. [Here follows a refer- 
ence to Cuba.] At the present moment an American squad- 
ron is preparing to sail for the Philippines. * * * The 
Americans will attack by sea and prevent any reinforce- 
ments coming from Spain; * * * we insurgents must 
attack by land. Probably you will have more than suffi- 
cient arms, because the Americans have arms and will 
find means to assist us. There where you see the American 
flag flying, assemble in numbers; they are our redeemers I x 

For twelve days after his letter to the State Depart- 
ment enclosing the above proclamation, Mr. Pratt, so 
far as the record discloses, contemplated his coup d 1 
Stat in silent satisfaction. Since its successful pulling 
off, Admiral Dewey had smashed the Spanish fleet, and 
Aguinaldo had started his auxiliary insurrection. The 
former was patting the latter on the back, as it were, 
and saying, "Go it little man." But nobody was 
patting Pratt on the back, yet. Therefore, on June 
2d, Mr. Pratt writes the State Department, purring 
for patting thus: 

Considering the enthusiastic manner General Aguinaldo 
has been received by the natives and the confidence with 
which he already appears to have inspired Admiral Dewey, 
it will be admitted, I think, that I did not over-rate his im- 
portance and that I have materially assisted the cause of the 
United States in the Philippines in securing his co-operation. 2 

1 Senate Document 62, p. 346. 2 lb., 349. 



io American Occupation of Philippines 

A glow of conscious superiority, in value to the Gov- 
ernment, over his consular colleague and neighbor, Mr. 
TVildman, at Hong Kong, next suffuses Mr. Pratt's 
diction, being manifested thus : 

Why this co-operation should not have been secured to 
us during the months General Aguinaldo remained awaiting 
events in Hong Kong, and that he was allowed to leave there 
without having been approached in the interest of our 
Government, I cannot understand. 

Considering that in his letter accepting the nomina- 
tion for the Vice-Presidency two years after this Mr. 
Roosevelt compared Aguinaldo and his people to that 
squalid old Apache medicine man, Sitting Bull, and his 
band of dirty paint-streaked cut-throats, Mr. Pratt's 
next Pickwickian sigh of complacent, if neglected, worth 
is particularly interesting: 

No close observer of what had transpired in the Philip- 
pines during the past four years could have failed to recog- 
nize that General Aguinaldo enjoyed above all others the 
confidence of the Filipino insurgents and the respect alike 
of Spaniards and foreigners in the islands, all of whom 
vouched for his high sense of justice and honor. 

In other words, knowing the proverbial ingratitude 
of republics, Mr. Pratt is determined to impress upon 
his Government and on the discerning historian of the 
future that he was "the original Aguinaldo man." 
A week later (June 9th) Mr. Pratt writes the Depart- 
ment enclosing copies of the Singapore papers of that 
date, giving an account of a generous outburst of 
Filipino enthusiasm at Singapore in honor of America, 
Admiral Dewey, and, last, if not least, Mr. Pratt. He 
encloses duplicate copies of these newspaper notices 



Mr. Pratt's Serenade n 

"for the press, should you consider their publication 
desirable." His letter begins: 

I have the honor to report that this afternoon, on the 
occasion of the receipt of the news of General Aguinaldo's 
recent successes near Manila, I was waited upon by the 
Philippine residents in Singapore and presented an ad- 
dress. * * * 

He then proceeds with further details of the event, 
without self -laudation. The Singapore papers which he 
encloses, however, not handicapped by the inexorable 
modesty of official correspondence, give a glowing 
account of the presentation of the " address, " and of the 
serenade and toasts which followed. Says one of them, 
the Straits Times: 

The United States consulate at Singapore was yesterday 
afternoon in an unusual state of bustle. That bustle 
extended itself to Raffles Hotel, of which the consulate 
forms an outlying part. From a period shortly prior to 
5 o'clock, afternoon, the natives of the Philippines resident 
in Singapore began to assemble at the consulate. Their 
object was to present an address to Hon. Spencer Pratt, 
United States Consul-General, and, partly, to serenade him, 
for which purpose some twenty-five or thirty of the Fili- 
pinos came equipped with musical instruments. 

First there was music by the band. Then followed 
the formal reading and presentation of the address by 
a Dr. Santos, representing the Filipino community of 
Singapore. The address pledged the " eternal grati- 
tude" of the Filipino people to Admiral Dewey and the 
honored addressee, alluded to the glories of indepen- 
dence, and to how Aguinaldo had been enabled by the 
arrangement so happily effected with Admiral Dewey by 
Consul Pratt to arouse 8,000,000 of Filipinos to take up 



12 American Occupation of Philippines 

arms "in defence of those principles of justice and 
liberty of which your country is the foremost champion " 
and trusted "that the United States * * * will effi- 
caciously second the programme arranged between you, 
sir, and General Aguinaldo in this port of Singapore, 
and secure to us our independence under the protection 
of the United States." 

Mr. Pratt arose and "proceeded speaking in French, " 
says the newspaper — it does not say Alabama French, 
but that is doubtless what it was — "to state his belief 
that the Filipinos would prove and were now proving 
themselves fit for self-government." The gentleman 
from Alabama then went on to review the mighty 
events and developments of the preceding six weeks, 
Dewey's victory of May 1st, 

the brilliant achievements of your own distinguished 
leader, General Emilio Aguinaldo, co-operating on land with 
the Americans at sea, etc. You have just reason to be 
proud of what has been and is being accomplished by 
General Aguinaldo and your fellow-countrymen under his 
command. When, six weeks ago, I learned that General 
Aguinaldo had arrived incognito in Singapore, I immediately 
sought him out. An hour's interview convinced me that he 
was the man for the occasion; and, having communicated 
with Admiral Dewey, I accordingly arranged for him to 
join the latter, which he did at Cavite. The rest you know. 

Says the newspaper clipping which has preserved the 
Pratt oration: "At the conclusion of Mr. Pratt's 
speech refreshments were served, and as the Filipinos, 
being Christians, drink alcohol, x there was no difficulty 
in arranging as to refreshments." 

Then followed a general drinking of toasts to America, 

1 The natives in and about Singapore are Mohammedans, forbidden 
by their religion to use alcoholic beverages. 



Mr. Pratt's Serenade 13 

Dewey, Pratt, and Aguinaldo. Then the band played. 
Then the meeting broke up. Then the Honorable 
Spencer Pratt, Consul-General of the United States, 
retired to the seclusion of his apartments in Raffles 
Hotel, and, under the soothing swish of his plunkah, 
forgot the accursed heat of that stepping-off place, 
Singapore, and dreamed of future greatness. 

A few days later the even tenor of Mr. Pratt's medi- 
tations was disturbed by a letter from the State Depart- 
ment saying, in effect, that it was all right to get 
Aguinaldo's assistance "if in so doing he was not in- 
duced to form hopes which it might not be practicable 
to gratify. ' ' x But it did not tell him to tell the Filipinos 
so. For Aguinaldo was keeping the Spaniards bottled 
up in the old walled city of Manila on short and ever 
shortening rations, and American troops were on the 
way to join him, and the shorter the food supply grew 
in Manila the readier the garrison would be to surrender 
when they did arrive, and the fewer American soldiers' 
lives would have to be sacrificed in the final capture of 
the town. Every day of Aguinaldo's service under the 
Dewey-Pratt arrangement was worth an American life, 
perhaps many. It was too valuable to repudiate, just 
yet. July 20th, the State Department wrote Mr. Pratt 
a letter acknowledging receipt of his of June 9th ''enclos- 
ing printed copies of a report from the Straits Times of 
the same day, entitled 'Mr. Spencer Pratt's Serenade,' 
with a view to its communication to the press," and 
not only not felicitating him on his serenade, but making 
him sorry he had ever had a serenade. It said, among 
other things : 

"The extract now communicated by you from the 
Straits Times of the 9th of June has occasioned a feeling 
of disquietude and a doubt as to whether some of your acts 

1 Senate Document 62, p. 354. 



14 American Occupation of Philippines 

may not have borne a significance and produced an 
impression which this government wo ^d feel compelled to 
regret. " x Hapless Pratt ! "Feel compelled to regret " 
is State Department for "You are liable to be fired." 

The letter of reprimand proceeds : 

"The address * * * discloses an understanding on 
their part that * * * the ultimate object of our 
action is * * * the independence of the Philippines 

* * * . Your address does not repel this implication 

# # * " 

The letter then scores Pratt for having called Agui- 
naldo "the man for the occasion, " and for having said 
that the "arrangement " between Aguinaldo and Dewey 
had "resulted so happily," and after a few further 
animadversions, concludes with this great blow to the 
reading public of Alabama: 

"For these reasons the Department has not caused 
the article to be given to the press lest it might seem 
thereby to lend a sanction to views the expression of 
which it had not authorized. " 

"The Department" was very scrupulous about 
even the appearance, at the American end of the 
line, of "lending a sanction" to Pratt's arrangement 
with Aguinaldo, while all the time it was knowingly 
permitting the latter to daily risk his own life and 
the lives of his countrymen on the faith of that very 
"arrangement," and it was so permitting this to 
be done because the "arrangement" was daily oper- 
ating to reduce the number of American lives which 
it would be necessary to sacrifice in the final taking of 
Manila. The day the letter of reprimand was written 
our troop-ships were on the ocean, speeding toward 
the Philippines. And Aguinaldo and his people were 
fighting the Spaniards with the pent-up feeling of 

1 Senate Document 62, p. 356c 



Mr. Pratt's Serenade 15 

centuries impelling their little steel- jacketed messengers 
of death, thinking of "Cuba Libre, " and dreaming of a 
Star of Philippine Independence risen in the Far East. 
Such are the circumstances from which the Filipino 
people derived their first impressions concerning 
the faith and honor of a strange people they had 
never theretofore seen, who succeeded the Spaniards 
as their overlords. Mr. Pratt was subsequently quietly 
separated from the consular service, and doubtless 
lived to regret that he had ever unloosed the foun- 
tains of his Alabama French on the Filipino colony of 
Singapore. 



CHAPTER II 
Dewey and Aguinaldo 

Armaments that thunderstrike the walls 
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake 
And monarchs tremble in their capitals. 

Childe Harold. 

THE battle of Manila Bay was fought May I, 1898. 
Until the thunder of Dewey's guns reverberated 
around the world, there was perhaps no part of it the 
American people knew less about than the Philippine 
Islands. 

We have all heard much of what happened after the 
battle, but comparatively few, probably, have ever had a 
glimpse at our great sailor while he was there in Hong 
Kong harbor, getting ready to go to sea to destroy the 
Spanish armada. Such a glimpse is modestly afforded 
by the Admiral in his testimony before the Senate 
Committee in 1902. x 

Asked by the Committee when he first heard from 
Aguinaldo and his people in 1898, Admiral Dewey 
said 2 : 

I should think about a month before leaving Hong Kong> 
that is, about the first of April, when it became pretty 
certain that there was to be war with Spain, I heard that 

1 Hearings on Philippine affairs, Senate Document 331, part 3, 
57th Cong., 1st Sess., 1901-2, proceedings of June 26-8, 1902. 

2 5. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2927. 

16 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 17 

there were a number of Filipinos in the city of Hong Kong 
who were anxious to accompany the squadron to Manila 
in case we went over. I saw these men two or three times 
myself. They seemed to be all very young earnest boys. 
I did not attach much importance to what they said or to 
themselves. Finally, before we left Hong Kong for Mirs 
Bay 1 I received a telegram from Consul- General Pratt at 
Singapore saying that Aguinaldo was there and anxious to 
see me. I said to him "All right; tell him to come on," 
but I attached so little importance to Aguinaldo that I 
did not wait for him. He did not arrive, and we sailed from 
Mirs Bay without any Filipinos. 

From his testimony before the Committee it is clear 
that Admiral Dewey's first impressions of the Filipinos, 
like those of most Americans after him, were not very 
favorable, that is to say, he did not in the outset take 
them very seriously. It will be interesting to consider 
these impressions, and then to compare them with those 
he gathered on better acquaintance from observing 
their early struggles for independence. The more 
intimate acquaintance, as has been the case with all 
his fellow countrymen since, caused him to revise his 
first verdict. Answering a question put by Senator 
Carmack concerning what transpired between him and 
the Philippine Revolutionists at Hong Kong before he 
sailed in search of the Spanish fleet, the Admiral said 2 : 

They were bothering me. I was getting my squadron 
ready for battle, and these little men were coming on board 
my ship at Hong Kong and taking a good deal of my time, 
and I did not attach the slightest importance to anything 
they could do, and they did nothing; that is, none of them 
went with me when I went to Mirs Bay. There had been 
a good deal of talk, but when the time came they did not 

1 The Senate Document has it backwards "left Mirs Bay for Hong 
Kong," clearly an error. 

2 5. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2932. 



1 8 American Occupation of Philippines 

go. One of them did n't go because he did nt have any tooth- 
brush. 

Senator Burrows: "Did he give that as his reason? " 
Admiral Dewey: "Yes, he said 'I have no tooth- 
brush.'" 

They used to come aboard my ship and take my time, and 
finally I would not see them at all, but turned them over 
to my staff. 

Now the lack of a tooth-brush is hardly a valid excuse 
for not going into battle, however great a convenience it 
may be in campaign. But the absence of orders from 
your commanding officer stands on a very different 
footing. Aguinaldo had not yet arrived. Three 
hundred years of Spanish misgovernment and cruelty 
is not conducive to aversion to fictitious excuses by 
the lowly in the presence of supreme authority. The 
answer was amusingly uncandid, but disproved neither 
patriotism nor intelligence. 

Aguinaldo arrived at Hong Kong from Singapore a 
day or so after Admiral Dewey had sailed for Manila. 
Of the battle of May ist, no detailed mention is es- 
sential here. Every schoolboy is familiar with it. It 
will remain, as long as the republic lasts, a part of 
the heritage of the nation. But the true glory of 
that battle, to my mind, rests, not upon the circum- 
stance that we have the Philippines, but upon the 
tremendous fact that before it occurred the attitude 
of our State Department toward an American citizen 
sojourning in distant lands and becoming involved 
in difficulties there had long been, "Why didn't 
he stay at home? Let him stew in his own juice"; 
whereas, since then, to be an American has been more 
like it was in the days of St. Paul to be a Roman citizen. 

May 1 6th, our consul at Hong Kong, Mr. Wildman, 
succeeded in getting the insurgent leader and his staff 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 19 

off for Manila on board the U. S. S. McCulloch by 
authority of Admiral Dewey. Like his colleague over 
at Singapore, Consul Wildman was bent on the role of 
Warwick. Admiral Dewey was quite busy there in 
Manila Bay the first two or three weeks after the battle, 
but yielding to the letters of Wildman, who meantime 
had constituted himself a kind of fiscal agent at Hong 
Kong for the prospective revolution in the matter of the 
purchase of guns and otherwise, the Admiral told the 
commanding officer of the McCulloch that on his next 
trip to Hong Kong he might bring down a dozen or so 
of the Filipinos there. The frame of mind they were 
in on reaching Manila, as a result of the assurances of 
Pratt and Wildman, is well illustrated by a letter the 
latter wrote Aguinaldo a little later (June 25th) which 
is undoubtedly in keeping with what he had been telling 
him earlier: 

Do not forget that the United States undertook this war 
for the sole purpose of relieving the Cubans from the 
cruelties under which they were suffering, and not for the 
love of conquest or the hope of gain. They are actuated by 
precisely the same feelings for the Filipinos. J 

And at the time, they were. 

"Every American citizen who came in contact with 
the Filipinos at the inception of the Spanish War, or 
at any time within a few months after hostilities began," 
said General Anderson in an interview published in 
the Chicago Record of February 24, 1900, " probably 
told those he talked with * * * that we intended to 
free them from Spanish oppression. The general ex- 
pression, was 'We intend to whip the Spaniards and 
set you free.'" 

The McCulloch arrived in Manila Bay with Aguinaldo 

1 Cong. Record, April 17, 1900, p. 4287. 



20 American Occupation of Philippines 

and his outfit, May 19th. Let Admiral Dewey tell 
what happened then 1 : 

Aguinaldo came to see me. I said, "Well now, go ashore 
there; we have got our forces at the arsenal at Cavite, go 
ashore and start your army. " He came back in the course 
of a few hours and said, "I want to leave here; I want to go 
to Japan." I said, "Don't give it up, Don Emilio." / 
wanted his help, you know. He did not sleep ashore that 
night; he slept on board the ship. The next morning he 
went on shore, still inside my lines, and began recruiting 
men. 

Enterprises of great pith and moment have often 
turned awry and lost the name of action for lack of a 
word spoken in season by a stout heart. Admiral 
Dewey spoke the word, and Aguinaldo, his protege, did 
the rest. "Then he began operations toward Manila, 
and he did wonderfully well. He whipped the Span- 
iards battle after battle * * * . " 2 In fact, the des- 
perate bravery of those little brown men after they got 
warmed up reminds one of the Japs at the walls of 
Peking, in the advance of the Allied Armies to the relief 
of the foreign legations during the Boxer troubles of 1900. 
Admiral Dewey told the Senate Committee in 1902 
that Aguinaldo actually wanted to put one of the old 
smooth-bore Spanish guns he found at Cavite on a barge 
and have him (Dewey) tow it up in front of Manila so 
he could attack the city with it. "I said, 'Oh no, no; 
we can do nothing until our troops come. ' ' 

Otherwise he was constantly advising and encouraging 
hint Why? Let the Admiral answer: "I knew that 
.what he was doing — driving the Spaniards in — was saving 
our troops. " 2 In other words they were daily dying that 
American soldiers might live, on the faith of the reasons 

S. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2928. 2 /6. 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 21 

for which we had declared war, and trusting, because 
of the words of our consuls and the acts of our admiral, 
in the sentiment subsequently so nobly expressed by 
Mr. McKinley in his instructions to the Paris Peace 
Commissioners : 

The United States in making peace should follow the 
same high rule of conduct which guided it in facing war. x 

"I did not know what the action of our Government 
would be," said the Admiral to the Committee, 2 add- 
ing that he simply used his best judgment on the spot 
at the time ; presumably supposing that his Government 
would do the decent thing by these people who con- 
sidered us their liberators. "They looked on us as 
their liberators, " said he. 3 "Up to the time the army 
came he (Aguinaldo) did everything I requested. He 
was most obedient; whatever I told him to do he did. 
I saw him almost daily. 4 I had not much to do with 
him after the army came." 5 

That was no ordinary occasion, that midsummer 
session of the Senate Committee in 1902. It was a 
case of the powerful of the earth discussing a ques- 
tion of ethics, even as they do in Boston. The 
nation had been intoxicated in 1898 with the pride 
of power — power revealed to it by the Spanish War; 
and in a spirit thus mellowed had taken the Philip- 
pines as a sort of political foreign mission, forgetting 
the injunction of the Fathers to keep Church and 
State separate, but not forgetting the possible prof- 
its of trade with the saved* A long war with the 
prospective saved had followed, developing many 
barbarities avenged in kind, and the breezes from the 

1 S. D. 148, 56th Cong., 2d Sess., 1901, p. 6. 

2 5. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2937. 3 5. d. 331, pt. 3, p. 2934. 

4 76., p. 2967. 5 See pp. 2928 and 2956, S. D. 331, part 3. 



22 American Occupation of Philippines 

South Seas were suggesting the aroma of shambles. 
"How did we get into all this mess, anyhow?" said the 
people. "Let us pause, and consider." Hear the 
still small voice of a nation's conscience mingling with 
demagogic nonsense perpetrated by potent, grave, and 
reverend Senators: 

Admiral Dewey: "I do not think it makes any differ- 
ence what my opinion is on these things." 

Senator Patterson: "There is no man whose opinion 
goes farther with the country than yours does, Admiral, 
and therefore I think you ought to be very prudent in 
expressing your views. " 

Senator Beveridge (Acting Chairman) : "The Chairman 
will not permit any member to lecture Admiral Dewey on 
his prudence or imprudence. " 

This of course would read well to "Mary of the Vine- 
clad Cottage" out in Indiana, whose four-year-old boy 
was named George Dewey — , or to her counterpart up 
in Vermont who might name her next boy after the 
brilliant and distinguished Acting Chairman, in token 
of her choice for the Presidency. 

Senator Patterson : "I was not lecturing him. ' ' 
Senator Beveridge: "Yes; you said he ought to be 

prudent." 

Senator Patterson: "And I think it was well enough to 

suggest those things. " x 

Thawed into theorizing by these indubitably genuine 
evidences of a nation's high regard, the man of action 
tried to help the nation out. He said he had used the 
Filipinos as the Federal troops used the negroes in the 
Civil War. Senator Patterson struck this suggestion 
amidships and sunk it with the remark that the negroes 
1 S. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2965. 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 23 

were expecting freedom. Admiral Dewey had said 
"The Filipinos were slaves too" and considered him 
their liberator. x But he never did elaborate on the new 
definition of freedom which had followed in the wake 
of his ships to Manila, viz., that Freedom does not 
necessarily mean freedom from alien domination, but 
only a change of masters deemed by the new master 
beneficial to the " slave. " 

Apropos of why he accepted Aguinaldo' s help, the 
Admiral also said : 

I was waiting for troops to arrive, and I felt sure the 
Filipinos could not take Manila, and I thought that the 
closer they invested the city the easier it would be when our 
troops arrived to march in. The Filipinos were our friends, 
assisting us ; they were doing our work. 2 

Asked as to how big a force Aguinaldo had under 
arms then and afterwards, the Admiral said maybe 
25,000, adding, by way of illustration of the pluck, 
vim, and patriotism of his valuable new-made friends, 
"They could have had any number of men; it was just 
a question of arming them. They could have had the 
whole population.'" 2 ' Eleven months after that, when 
we captured the first insurgent capital, Malolos, General 
MacArthur, the ablest and one of the bravest generals 
we ever set to slaughtering Filipinos, said to a newspaper 
man just after a bloody and of course victorious fight: 
"When I first started in against these rebels, I believed 
that Aguinaldo's troops represented only a faction. " 
" I did not like, " said this veteran of three wars, who was 
always "on the job" in action out there as elsewhere, 
"/ did not like to believe that the whole population of 
Luzon * * * was opposed to us * * * but after having 
come thus far, and having been brought much in 

1 S. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2939. 2 lb., p. 2936. 3 lb., p. 2940. 



24 American Occupation of Philippines 

contact with both insurrectos and amigos, I have been 
reluctantly compelled to believe that the Filipino masses 
are loyal to Aguinaldo and the government which he 
heads. 1 ' 1 

Is it at all unlikely that Admiral Dewey did in fact 
say of his proteges, the Filipinos, to an American 
visiting Manila in January, 1899, three or four weeks 
before the war broke out, "Rather than make a war 
of conquest upon the Filipino people, I would up anchor 
and sail out of the harbor."? 2 

If Dewey and MacArthur were right, then, about the 
situation around Manila in 1898, it was a case of an 
entire people united in an aspiration, and looking to us 
for its fulfilment. 

When the American troops reached the Philippines 
and perfected their battle formations about Manila, 
and the order to advance was given, they did "march 
in," to use Admiral Dewey's expression above quoted. 
But they did not let the Filipinos have a finger in the 
pie. The conquest and retention of the islands had 
then been determined upon. The Admiral's reasons 
for saddling his protege with a series of bloody battles 
and a long and arduous campaign are certainly stated 
with the proverbial frankness of the sailorman: "I 
wanted his help, you know. " But what was Aguinaldo 
to get out of the transaction, from the Dewey point of 
view? 

1 See letter of H. Irving Hancock, American war correspondent in the 
field, dated Manila, May 3, 1899, published New York Criterion, June 
17, 1899. This Hancock interview with General MacArthur was 
quoted in debate on the floor of the Senate on April 17, 1900 (see Cong. 
Rec. of that date), and was corroborated by General MacArthur him- 
self as substantially correct in that officer's testimony before the Senate 
in 1902, S. D. 3 j 1, pt. 2, 57th Congress, 1st Session, p. 1942, in 
answer to questions put by Senator Culberson. 

2 Rev. Clay Macaulay, who afterwards made that statement in 
a letter to the Boston Transcript. 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 25 

"They wanted to get rid of the Spaniards. I do not 
think they looked much beyond that, " z said the Ad- 
miral to the Senate Committee. Let us see whether 
they did or not. Aguinaldo had been shipped by the 
Honorable E. Spencer Pratt, Consul- General of the 
United States at Singapore, from that point to Hong 
Kong on April 26th, consigned to his fellow Warwick, 
the Honorable Rounseville Wildman, Consul-General of 
the United States at the last-named place, and had 
been received in due course by the consignee. May 
5th, at Hong Kong, the Filipino Revolutionary Com- 
mittee had a meeting, the minutes of which we sub- 
sequently came into possession of, along with other 
captured insurgent papers. The following is an extract 
from those minutes: 

Once the President [Aguinaldo] is in the Philippines with 
his prestige, he will be able to arouse the masses to combat 
the demands of the United States, if they should colonize 
that country, and will drive them, the Filipinos, if circum- 
stances render it necessary, to a Titanic struggle for their 
independence, even if later they should succumb to the 
weight of the yoke of a new oppressor. If Washington 
proposes to carry out the fundamental principles of its 
Constitution, it is most improbable that an attempt will be 
made to colonize the Philippines or annex them. It is prob- 
able then that independence will be guaranteed. 2 

The truth is that instead of leaving everything to the 
chance of our continuing in the same unselfish frame 
of mind we were really in when the Spanish-American 
War started, Aguinaldo and his people, not sure but 
what in the wind-up they might even be thrown back 
upon the tender mercies of Spain, played their cards 

* S. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2939. 

2 S. D. 208, part 2, 56th Congress, ist Sess., pp. 7, 8. 



26 American Occupation of Philippines 

boldly and consistently from the beginning with a view 
of organizing a de facto government and getting it 
recognized by the Powers as such at the very earliest 
practicable moment. They believed that the Lord 
helps those who help themselves. They had antici- 
pated our change of heart and already had it discounted 
before we were aware of it ourselves. They were 
already acting on the idea that eternal vigilance is the 
price of liberty while public opinion in the United 
States concerning them was in a chrysalis state, and 
trying to develop a new definition of Liberty which 
should comport with the subjugation of distant island 
subjects by a continental commonwealth on the other 
side of the world based on representative government. 
The prospective subjects did not believe that a legisla- 
ture ten thousand miles away in which they had no 
vote would ever give them a square deal about tariff 
and other laws dictated by special interests. They had 
had three hundred years of just that very sort of thing 
under Spain and instinctively dreaded continuance of it. 
That their instincts did not deceive them, our later 
study of Congressional legislation will show. The 
Filipinos had greatly pondered their future in their 
hearts during the last twelve months of Spain's colonial 
empire, watching her Cuban embarrassments with 
eager eye. 

Having seen the frame of mind in which they ap- 
proached the contract implied in Admiral Dewey's 
cheery words, "Well now, go ashore there and start your 
army, " what were the facts of recent history within the 
knowledge of both parties at the time? What had 
been the screams of the American eagle, if any, con- 
cerning his moral leadership of the family of unf eathered 
bipeds? 

President McKinley's annual message to Congress 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 27 

of December, 1897, T calling attention to conditions 
in Cuba as intolerable, had declared that if we should 
intervene to put a stop to them, we certainly would 
not make it the occasion of a land -grab. The 
other nations said: "We are from Missouri." But 
Mr. McKinley said, " forcible annexation" was not to 
be thought of by us. "That by our code of morality 
would be criminal," etc. So the world said, "We shall 
see what we shall see." Then had come the war 
message of April 11, 1898, 2 reiterating the declaration 
of the Cuban message of December previous, that 
"forcible annexation by our code of morality would be 
criminal aggression." In other words we announced 
to the overcrowded monarchies of the old world, whose 
land-lust is ever tempted by the broad acres of South 
America, and ever cooled by the virile menace of the 
Monroe doctrine, that we not only were against the 
principle of land-grabbing, but would not indulge in 
the practice. Immediately upon the conclusion of the 
reading of the war message, Senator Stewart was 
recognized, and said, among other things: "Under 
the law of nations, intervention for conquest is con- 
demned, and is opposed to the universal sentiment of 
mankind. It is unjust, it is robbery, to intervene for 
conquest." Then Mr. Lodge stood up, "in the Senate 
House a Senator," and said: 

We are there [meaning in this present Cuban situation] 
because we represent the spirit of liberty and the spirit of 
the new time, and Spain is over against us because she is 
mediaeval, cruel, dying. We have grasped no man's terri- 
tory, we have taken no man's property, we have invaded 
no man's rights. We do not ask their lands. 3 

1 Cong. Record, December, 1897. 

2 See Cong. Record, April 11, 1898, pp. 3699 et seq. 

3 Cong. Record, April 13, 1898, pp. 3701 et seq. 



28 American Occupation of Philippines 

These speeches went forth to the world almost like 
a part of the message itself. And Admiral Dewey, like 
every other American, in his early dealings with Aguin- 
aldo, after war broke out, must have assumed a mental 
attitude in harmony with these announcements. But 
the world said, "All this is merely what you Americans 
yourselves call 'hot air/ We repeat, 'We are from 
Missouri. ' " Then we said: "Oh very well, we will 
show you." So in the declaration of war against 
Spain we inserted the following: 

Fourth: That the United States hereby disclaims any 
disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, 
or control over said island except for the pacification thereof, 
and asserts its determination when that is accomplished, to 
leave the government and control of the island to its people. 

This meant, "It is true we do love the Almighty 
Dollar very dearly, oh, Sisters of the Family of Nations, 
but there are some axiomatic principles of human liberty 
that we love better, and one of them is the l unalienable 
right ' of every people to pursue happiness in their own 
way, free from alien domination." All these things 
were well known to both the contracting parties when 
Admiral Dewey set Aguinaldo ashore at Cavite, May 
20, 1898, and got him to start his insurrection "un- 
der the protection of our guns," as he expressed it. 1 
Accordingly, when the insurgent leader went ashore, 
the declaration of war was his major premise, the 
assurances of our consuls and the acts of our Admiral 
pursuant thereto were his minor premise, and Inde- 
pendence was his conclusion. Trusting to the faith 
and honor of the American people, he took his life in 
his hands, left the panoplied safety of our mighty 

1 Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 103. 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 29 

squadron, and plunged, single-handed, into the struggle 
for Freedom. 

What was the state of the public mind on shore, 
and how was it prepared to receive his assurances of 
American aid? Consider the following picture in the 
light of its sombre sequel. 

Just as the war broke out, Consul Williams had left 
Manila and gone over to Hong Kong, where he joined 
Admiral Dewey, and accompanied him back to Manila, 
and was thus privileged to be present at the battle 
of Manila Bay, May 1st. Under date of May 12th, 
from his consular headquarters aboard the U. S. S. 
Baltimore, he reports 1 going ashore at Cavite and 
being received with enthusiastic greetings by vast 
crowds of Filipinos. "They crowded around me," 
says Brother Williams, "hats off, shouting ' Viva los 
Americanos, 1 thronged about me by hundreds to 
shake either hand, even several at a time, men, 
women, and children, striving to get even a finger to 
shake.' Sol moved half a mile, shaking continuously 
with both hands. " 

Tut! tut! says the casual reader. What did the 
Government at Washington know of all these goings on, 
that it should be charged later with having violated 
as binding a moral obligation as ever a nation assumed? 
It is true that the news of the Williams ovation, as in 
the case of the Pratt serenade, reached Washington 
only by the slow channels of the mail. But Washing- 
ton did in fact receive the said news by due course of 
mail. When it came, however, Washington was nurs- 
ing visions of savages in blankets smoking the pipe of 
peace with the agents of the Great White Father in 
the White House — i.e., thought, or hoped, the Filipi- 
nos were savages — and remained as deaf to the sounds 

1 S. D. 62, p. 327. 



30 American Occupation of Philippines 

of the Williams ovation as it had been to the strains 
of the Pratt serenade. 

However, hardly had Admiral Dewey taken his 
binoculars from the gig that carried Aguinaldo ashore 
to raise his auxiliary insurrection, when he called his 
Flag Secretary, or the equivalent, and dictated the 
following cablegram to the Secretary of the Navy : 

Aguinaldo, the rebel commander-in-chief, was brought 
down by the McCulloch. Organizing forces near Cavite, 
and may render assistance that will be valuable. 1 

This sounds a little more serious than " earnest boys" 
alleging the lack of a toothbrush as an excuse for 
declining mortal combat, does it not? How valuable 
did this assistance prove? Admiral Dewey had to 
wait three and one half months for the army to arrive, 
and this is how the commanding general of the American 
forces describes conditions as he found them in the 
latter part of August : 

For three and one half months Admiral Dewey with his 
squadron and the insurgents on land had kept Manila 
tightly bottled. All commerce had been interdicted, inter- 
nal trade paralyzed, and food supplies were nearly ex- 
hausted. 2 

And, he might have added, the taking of the city was 
thus made perfectly easy. Otherwise, as Aguinaldo 
put it in one of his letters to General Otis, we would 
not have taken a city, but only the ruins of a city. 
Admiral Dewey said to the Senate Committee in 1902 : 
''They [the Spaniards] surrendered on August 13th, and 
they had not gotten a thing in after the 1st of May. " 3 

1 Navy Dept. Report, 1898, App., p. 100. Dispatch May 20, 1898. 

2 War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i, pt. 4, p. 13. 

3 5. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2930. 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 31 

In the early part of the next year, 1899, President 
McKinley sent out a kind of olive-branch commission, 
of which President Schurman of Cornell University was 
Chairman. The olive branch got withered in the 
sulphur of exploding gun-powder, so the Commission 
contented itself with making a report. And this is 
what they said concerning what followed the Dewey- 
Aguinaldo entente: 

Shortly afterwards, the Filipinos began to attack the 
Spanish. Their number was rapidly augmented by the 
militia who had been given arms by Spain, all of whom 
revolted and joined the insurgents. Great Filipino suc- 
cesses followed, many Spaniards were taken prisoners, and 
while the Spanish troops now remained quietly in Manila, 
the Filipino forces made themselves masters of the entire 
island [of Luzon] except that city. z 

Of conditions in July, sixty days after Admiral 
Dewey had on May 20th said to Aguinaldo in effect, 
"Go it, little man, we need you in our business," Mr. 
Wildman, our Consul at Hong Kong, writing to the 
State Department, said, in defending himself for his 
share in the business of getting Aguinaldo' s help under 
promises, both express and implied, which were subse- 
quently repudiated, that after he, Wildman, put the 
insurgent chief aboard the McCulloch, May 16th, 
bound for Manila to co-operate by land with our navy : 
"He * * * organized a government * * * and from 
that day to this he has been uninterruptedly successful 
in the field and dignified and just as the head of his 
government," 2 a statement which Admiral Dewey 
subsequently endorsed 3 . 

We have seen the preliminaries of this "government " 
started under the auspices of our Admiral and under 

1 Report Schurman Commission, vol. i., p. 172. 

2 5. D. 62, p. 337. 3 5. d. j j 1, p t. 3> 1902, p. 2951. 



32 American Occupation of Philippines 

what he himself called "the protection of our guns' ' 
(ante). Let us note its progress. If you turn the 
leaves of the contemporaneous official reports, you see 
quite a moving picture show, and the action is rapid. 
On May 24th, still " under the protection of our guns, " 
Aguinaldo proclaimed his revolutionary government 
and summoned the people to his standard for the pur- 
pose of driving the Spaniards out forever. The situa- 
tion was an exact counterpart of the cotemporary 
Cuban one as regards identity of purpose between 
"liberator" and "oppressed." His proclamation 
promised a constitutional convention to be called later 
(and which was duly called later) to elect a President 
and Cabinet, in whose favor he would resign the emer- 
gency authority now assumed; referred to the United 
States as "undoubtedly disinterested" and as consider- 
ing the Filipinos "capable of governing for ourselves 
our unfortunate country"; and formally announced 
the temporary assumption of supreme authority as 
dictator. Copies of these proclamations were duly 
furnished Admiral Dewey. The latter was too busy 
looking after the men behind his guns and watching 
the progress of his plucky little ally to study Spanish, 
so he forwarded them to the Navy Department without 
comment — "without reading them," said he to the 
Senate Committee in 1902. x When his attention was 
called to them before the Committee by one of the 
members reading them, his comment was, "Nothing 
about independence there, is there? " 2 It seems to me 
it did not take an international lawyer to see a good deal 
"there," about independence. In a proclamation 
published at Tarlac in the latter part of 1899, which 
appears to have been a sort of swan-song of the Philip- 
pine Republic, Aguinaldo had said, in effect, " Certainly 
1 S. D. 331, p. 2955. * /k f p# 2954# 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 33 

Admiral Dewey did not bring me from Hong Kong 
to Manila to fight the Spaniards for the benefit of 
American Trade Expansion," and in this proclama- 
tion he claimed that Admiral Dewey promised him 
independence. It is true, that in a letter to Senator 
Lodge, which that distinguished gentleman read on the 
floor of the Senate on January 31, 1900, Admiral Dewey 
denounced this last statement as false. It is also true 
that those Americans are few and far between who will 
take Aguinaldo 's word in preference to Admiral Dewey's. 
Certainly the writer is not one of them. But Aguinaldo 
is no Spanish scholar, being more of a leader of men than 
a master of language, and what sort of an interpreter 
acted between him and the Admiral does not appear. 
Certainly he never did get anything in writing from 
Admiral Dewey. But after the latter brought him to 
Manila, set him to fighting the common enemy, and 
helped him with guns and otherwise in quickly organ- 
izing an army for the purpose, the Admiral was at least 
put on inquiry as to just what Aguinaldo supposed he 
was fighting for. What did the Admiral probably 
suppose? He told the Senate Committee that the idea 
that they wanted independence " never entered his 
head. " The roar of mighty guns seems to have made 
it difficult for him to hear the prattlings of what 
Aguinaldo's proclamations of the time called "the 
legitimate aspirations of a people." The milk in the 
cocoanut is this: How could it ever occur to a 
great naval commander, such as Admiral Dewey, 
familiar with the four quarters of the globe, that a 
coterie of politicians at home would be so foolish as 
to buy a vast straggly archipelago of jungle-covered 
islands in the South Seas which had been a nuisance 
to every government that ever owned them? But let 
us turn from the Senate Committee's studies of 



34 American Occupation of Philippines 

1902 to the progress of the infant republic of 1898 
at Cavite. 

The same day the above proclamations of May 24th 
were issued, we find Consul Williams, now become a sort 
of amphibious civilian aide to Dewey, having his 
consular headquarters afloat, on the U. S. S. Baltimore, 
of the squadron, writing the State Department, describ- 
ing the great successes of the insurgents, his various 
conferences with Aguinaldo and the other leaders, and 
his own activities in arranging the execution of a power 
of attorney whereby Aguinaldo released to certain 
parties in Hong Kong $400,000 then on deposit to his 
credit in a Hong Kong bank, for the purpose of enabling 
them to pay for 3000 stand of arms bought there and 
expected to arrive at Cavite on the morrow, and for 
other needed expenses of the revolutionary movement. 
He says, in part: "Officers have visited me during 
the darkness of the night to inform the fleet and me of 
their operations, and to report increase of strength. 
When General Merritt arrives he will find large 
auxiliary land forces adapted to his service and 
used to the climate." 1 Throughout this period Ad- 
miral Dewey reports various cordial conferences 
with Aguinaldo, though he is not so literary as to 
vivify his accounts with allusions to the weather. 
In one despatch he states that he has " refrained 
from assisting him * * * with the forces under my 
command" 2 — explaining to him that "the squadron 
could not act until the arrival of the United States 
troops." 

Six days after the issuance of the Dictatorship proc- 
lamations above mentioned, viz., on May 30th, Admiral 
Dewey cables the Navy Department 3 : 

*S.D. 62, pp. 328-9. 

2 Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 103. J lb., p. 102. 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 35 

Aguinaldo, revolutionary leader, visited Olympia yester- 
day. He expects to make general attack May 31st. 

He did not succeed entirely, but there was hard 
fighting, and the cordon around the doomed Spaniards 
in Manila and its suburbs was drawn ever closer and 
closer. 

The remarkable feat of Aguinaldo's raising a right 
formidable fighting force in twelve days after his little 
" Return from Elba," which force kept growing like a 
snowball, is difficult, for one who does not know the 
Filipinos, and the conditions then, to credit. It is 
explained by the fact that Admiral Dewey let him have 
the captured guns in the Cavite arsenal, that Cavite 
was a populous hotbed of insurrection, and that many 
native regiments, or parts of regiments, quite suited to 
be the nucleus of an army, having lots of veteran 
non-commissioned officers, deserted the Spaniards 
and went over to the insurgents, their countrymen, 
as soon as Aguinaldo arrived. 

On June 6th, we have another bulletin sent to the 
Navy Department by Admiral Dewey, transmitting 
with perceptible satisfaction further information as to 
the progress of his indefatigable protege: 

Insurgents have been engaged actively within the prov- 
ince of Cavite during the last week ; they have had several 
small victories, taking prisoners about 1800 men, 50 officers ; 
Spanish troops, not native. x 

Along about this period Aguinaldo happens to get 
hold of a belated copy of the London Times of May 5, 
1898. It contains considerable speculation on the 
future of the Philippines which casts a shadow over 
the soul of the president of the incipient republic. 

1 Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 102. 



36 American Occupation of Philippines 

Having read President McKinley's immortal State 
papers about the moral obliquity of "forcible annexa- 
tion, " he is moved to write direct to the source of those 
noble sentiments. The letter is dated June 10, 1898. 
It is addressed, with a quaintness now pathetic, 
"To the President of the Republic of the Great 
North American Nation." It greets the addressee 
with "the most tender effusion of" the writer's soul, 
expresses his "deep and sincere gratitude," in the 
name of his people, "for the efficient and disinterested 
protection which you have decided to give it to shake 
off the yoke of the cruel and corrupt Spanish domina- 
tion, as you are doing to the equally unfortunate Cuba " 
and then proceeds to tell of "the great sorrow which all 
of us Filipinos felt on reading in the Times the astound- 
ing statement that you, sir, will retain these islands," 
etc. He proceeds: 

The Philippine people * * * have seen in your nation, 
ever since your fleet destroj^ed in a moment the Spanish 
fleet which was here * * * the angel who is the harbinger 
of their liberty; and they rose like a single wave * * * as 
soon as I trod these shores ; and captured in ten days nearly 
the whole garrison of this Province of Cavite in whose port 
I have my government — by the consent of the Admiral of your 
triumphant fleet. x 

The writer closes his letter with an impassioned 
protest against the occurrence of what is suggested in 
the Times, and speaks of his fellow-countrymen as 
"a people which trusts blindly in you not to abandon it 
to the tyranny of Spain, but to leave it free and inde- 
pendent," and adds his "fervent prayers for the ever- 
increasing prosperity of your powerful nation." 2 
But the signer of the foregoing letter did not spend 
1 S. D. 62, p. 362. 2 lb., pp. 360-1. 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 37 

all his time praying for us, as may be observed in this 
bulletin from Admiral Dewey concerning the way he 
was lambasting the common enemy, sent the Navy 
Department, June 12th: 

Insurgents continue hostilities and have practically sur- 
rounded Manila. They have taken 2500 Spanish prisoners, 
whom they treat most humanely. They do not intend 
to attack city proper until the arrival of United States 
troops thither ; I have advised. * 

Four days later Washington chided the hapless Pratt 
at Singapore about having talked to Aguinaldo of 
''direct co-operation" with Admiral Dewey, saying: 
"To obtain the unconditional personal assistance of 
General Aguinaldo in the expedition to Manila was 
proper, if in so doing he was not induced to form hopes 
which it might not be practicable to gratify." 2 This 
communication goes on to advise Mr. Pratt that the 
Department cannot approve anything he may have 
said to Aguinaldo on behalf of the United States which 
would concede that in accepting his co-operation we 
would owe him anything. Yet it did not tell Admiral 
Dewey to quit coaching him, because the service he was 
rendering was too valuable. There is no communication 
to Admiral Dewey about "hopes which it might not 
be practicable to gratify" in the official archives of 
those times. There was Admiral Dewey coaching 
Aguinaldo and telling him to wait for the main attack 
until General Merritt should arrive with our troops. 
Why? Because he expected Merritt to co-operate 
with Aguinaldo, and of course Aguinaldo expected 
exactly what Dewey expected. 

In reviewing the history of those times the writer has 
not been so careless as to have overlooked Senator 

1 Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 106. 3 S. D. 62, p. 354- 



$S American Occupation of Philippines 

Lodge's elaborate speech in the Senate on March 7, 
1900, wherein attention is called to the circumstance 
that a few days after Aguinaldo landed at Cavite, the 
Navy Department cabled cautioning Dewey to have no 
alliance with him that might complicate us, and that 
the Admiral answered he had made no alliance and 
would make none. But if actions speak louder than 
words, the Senator's point does not rise above the 
dignity of a technicality. 

The same day the State Department reprimanded 
Pratt, as above indicated, viz., June 16th, Consul 
Williams at Manila wrote them a glowing communica- 
tion 1 about how " active and almost uniformly succesr- 
f ul ' ' Aguinaldo was continuing to be. But no resultant 
enthusiasm is of record. Two days later, on June 18th, 
Aguinaldo issued his first formal Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. The infant republic was now less than a 
month old, but it already had a fine set of teeth. The 
Spaniards had seen them. The proclamation was of 
course addressed to the Filipino people, and called on 
them to rally to the cause, but he was also driving at 
recognition by the Powers. It read in part : "In the 
face of the whole world I have proclaimed that the 
aspiration of my whole life, the final object of all my 
wishes and efforts, is your independence, because I have 
the inner conviction that it is also your constant long- 
ing. " 2 Many Americans insist that this is mere 
"hot air" and that the average Filipino peasant does 
not think much more than his plough animal, the scoffer 
himself being stupidly unaware that this has been 
precisely the argument of tyranny in all ages. But the 
pride a people will have in seeing the best educated and 
most able men of their own race in charge of their affairs 
seems to me too obvious to need elaboration. It. was 

1 5. D. 62, p. 329. 2 lb., p. 432. 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 39 

always accepted by us as axiomatic until we took the 
Philippines. It is a cruel species of wickedness for an 
American to tell his countrymen that the Filipino 
people do not want independence, for some of them may 
believe it. 

The Declaration of Independence of June 18th is 
known to students of Philippine political archaeology as 
the Proclamation establishing the "dictatorial" govern- 
ment. The principal thing it did was to supplement 
the absolute dictatorship proclaimed May 24th by 
provisions for organizing in detail. It also declared 
independence. A more elaborate Declaration followed 
on June 23d, known as the proclamation establishing 
the " revolutionary " government. This made provi- 
sion for a Congress, a Cabinet, and courts. Of course 
it was only a paper government the day the ink dried 
on it. But we will follow it through its teething, and 
adolescence, to the attainment of its major'ty at an 
inauguration where the president was driven to the 
place of the taking of the oath of office in a coach and 
four, through a short and very self-respecting heyday, 
and a longer peripatetic existence, to final dissolution. 
The document of June 23d reminds us of a fact which in 
reading it at this late date we are apt to forget, viz., 
that the Filipinos did not know at what moment their 
powerful ally, the American squadron, might up anchor 
and sail away to the high seas, to meet another Spanish 
fleet; thus leaving them to the tender mercies of the 
Spaniards, possibly forever. So they were losing no 
time. In fact, they had set to work from the very 
beginning with a determination to try and secure 
recognition from the Powers at the earliest moment. 
In appealing to the public opinion of the world with a 
view of paving the way to recognition by the Powers — 
which recognition would mean getting arms for war 



40 American Occupation of Philippines 

with Spain or any other power without the incon- 
veniences of filibustering — Aguinaldo says on behalf of 
his people in the proclamation of June 23d, above men- 
tioned, that they ''now no longer limit themselves to 
asking for assimilation with the political constitution 
of Spain, but ask for a complete separation (and) 
strive for independence, completely assured that the 
time has come when they can and ought to govern 
themselves." 

Mr. Frank D. Millet, who reached Manila soon 
enough (in July) to see the ripples of this proclamation, 
describes the effect on the people. While Mr. Millet 
is one of the best men that anybody ever knew, a 
proposition as to which I am quite sure the President of 
the United States and many people great and small in 
many lands would affirm my judgment, x still, he writes 
from a frankly White Man's Burden or land-grabbing 
standpoint — is in harmony with his environment. At 
page 50 of his book, 2 he reproduces the proclamation 
last above quoted from, and adds the following satirical 
comment: ''This flowery production was widely 
circulated and had a great effect on the imagination of 
the people, who, in the elation of their present success 
in investing the town and in their belief that the United 
States was beginning a campaign in the Philippines to 
free them from Spanish oppression (italics mine) shortly 
came to think that they were already a nation. " 

Copies of these June proclamations also, as in the 
case of those of May 24th, were duly forwarded by 
Aguinaldo to Admiral Dewey 3 and by him forwarded to 
Washington without comment. In his letter trans- 

1 Alas, that rare man, Frank Millet, perished in the Titanic disaster 
of April, 1912, since the above was written. 

2 Expedition to the Philippines. 

3 Navy DepL Report, 1898, Appendix, p. in. 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 41 

mitting them to Dewey, Aguinaldo announces that his 
government has " taken possession of the various provinces 
of the archipelago.'" Just exactly how many provinces 
he had control of on June 23d will be examined later. 
The very same day the proclamation of June 23d declaring 
independence was issued, Admiral Dewey cabled the 
Navy Department 1 : ''Aguinaldo has acted indepen- 
dently of the squadron, but has kept me advised of his 
progress which has been wonderful. I have allowed him 
to take from the arsenal such Spanish arms and ammuni- 
tion as he needed." After adding that " Aguinaldo 
expects to capture Manila without any assistance," 
the Admiral, evidently divining the temptation that 
was then luring the political St. Anthonies at Washing- 
ton, volunteers this timely suggestion : 

In my opinion these people are superior in intelligence 
and more capable of self-government than the natives of 
Cuba, and I am familiar with both races. 1 

That there may be no doubt about the motive behind 
that suggestion, it may be noted here that the Admiral 
told the Senate Committee in 1902: "I wrote that 
because I saw in the newspapers that Congress contem- 
plated giving the Cubans independence.'' 12 

But this is not all. On August 13th, the day after 
the Peace Protocol was signed, Mr. McKinley wired 
Admiral Dewey asking about "the desirability of the 
several islands," the "coal and mineral deposits," and 
in reply on August 29th, the Admiral wrote: 

In a telegram sent the Department on June 23d, I expressed 
the opinion that " these people are far superior in their 
intelligence and more capable of self-government than the 

1 Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 103. 

2 See p. 2934, S. D. 331, pt. 3, 57th Cong., 1st Sess. 



42 American Occupation of Philippines 

natives of Cuba, and I am familiar with both races. " 
Further intercourse with them has confirmed me in this 
opinion. 1 

As a result of one year's stay in Cuba, and six in the 
Philippines — two in the army that subjugated the 
Filipinos and four as a judge over them- — I heartily 
concur in the above opinion of Admiral Dewey, but 
with this addition: Whatever of solidarity for govern- 
mental purposes the Filipinos may have lacked at the 
date of the Admiral's communications, they were cer- 
tainly welded into conscious political unity, as one 
people, in their war for independence against us. 

In the 1609 or Douay (pronounce Dewey) version of 
the Bible, the Latin Vulgate, Luke's version of the 
Lord's Prayer only says " Lead us not into temptation, " 
while Matthew adds "but deliver us from evil." The 
Dewey suggestions to the Washington Government in 
1898 remind a regretful nation of both the evangelical 
versions mentioned, for the first seems to say what 
Luke says, and the second seems to add what Matthew 
adds. 

There is not an American who has known the Fili- 
pinos since the beginning of the American occupation 
who doubts for a moment that but for our intervention 
a Republic would have been established out there 
underthe lead of Aguinaldo, Mabini, and their associates, 
which would have compared well with the republican 
governments between the United States and Cape 
Horn. The writer doubts very much if President 
Taft is of a contrary opinion. The real issue is, now 
that we have them, should we keep them in spite of the 
tariff iniquities which the Trusts perpetrate on them 
through Congress, until they have received the best 

1 S. D. 62, p. 383. 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 43 

possible tuition we can give them, or be content to give 
them their independence when they are already at 
least as fit for it as the Republics to the South of 
us, guaranteeing them independence by international 
agreement like that which protects Belgium and 
Switzerland? 

Now why did Admiral Dewey repeat to his home 
government and emphasize on August 29th a suggestion 
so extremely pertinent to the capacity of the Filipinos 
for self-government which he had already made in 
lucid language on June 23d previous ? The answer is not 
far to seek. General Anderson had arrived between the 
two dates, with the first American troops that reached 
the islands after the naval battle of May 1st, and 
brought the Admiral the first intimation, which came 
somewhat as a surprise of course, that there was serious 
talk in the United States of retaining the Philippines. 
"I was the first to tell Admiral Dewey," says General 
Anderson in the North American Review for February, 
1900, "that there was any disposition on the part of 
the American people to hold the Philippines if they were 
captured." He adds: "Whether Admiral Dewey and 
Consuls Pratt, Wildman, and Williams did or did not 
give Aguinaldo assurances that a Filipino government 
would be recognized, the Filipinos certainly thought 
so, judging from their acts rather than from their 
words. Admiral Dewey gave them arms and ammuni- 
tion, as I did subsequently at his request." 

General Anderson might have added that whenever 
the Admiral captured prisoners from the Spaniards 
he would promptly turn them over to the Filipinos — 
1300 at one clip in the month of June at Olongapo. 1 
These 1300 were men a German man-of-war prevented 

1 See Admiral Dewey's testimony before the Senate Committee of 
1902, S. D. 331, pp. 2942, 2957. 



44 American Occupation of Philippines 

the Filipinos from taking until Aguinaldo reported the 
matter to Admiral Dewey, whereupon, he promptly 
sent Captain Coghlan with the Raleigh and another 
of his ships to the scene of the trouble, and Captain 
Coghlan said to the German "Hoch der Kaiser" etc. 
or words to that effect, and made him go about his 
business and let our ally alone. Then Captain Cogh- 
lan took the 1300 prisoners himself and turned them 
over to Aguinaldo by direction of Admiral Dewey. The 
motive for, as well as the test of, an alliance, is that the 
other fellow can bring into the partnership something 
you lack. The navy had no way to keep prisoners of 
war. There can be no doubt that if Admiral Dewey's 
original notions about meeting the problems presented 
by his great victory of May 1, 1898, had been followed, 
we never would have had any trouble with the Filipinos ; 
nor can there be any doubt that he made them his allies 
and used them as such. They were very obedient 
allies at that, until they saw the Washington Govern- 
ment was going to repudiate the "alliance, " and with- 
hold from them what they had a right to consider the 
object and meaning of the alliance, if it meant anything. 
The truth is, as Secretary of War Taft said in 1905, 
before the National Geographic Society in Washington, 
''We blundered into colonization. " * As we have seen, 
Admiral Dewey repeatedly expressed the opinion, in the 
summer of 1898, that the Filipinos were far superior in 
intelligence to the Cubans and more capable of self- 
government. He of course saw quite clearly then, 
when he was sending home those commendations of 
Filipino fitness for self-government, just as we have all 
come to realize since, that a coaling station would be 
the main thing we should need in that part of the world 
in time of war ; that Manila, being quite away from the 

1 See National Geographic Magazine, August, 1905. 



Dewey and Aguinaldo 45 

mainland of Asia, could never supersede Hong Kong 
as the gateway to the markets of Asia, since neither 
shippers nor the carrying trade of the world will ever 
see their way to unload cargo at Manila by way of 
rehearsal before unloading on the mainland; and that 
the taking of the islands was a dubious step from a 
financial standpoint, and a still more dubious one from 
the strategic standpoint of defending them by land, 
in the event of war with Japan, Germany, or any other 
first-class power. At this late date, when the passions 
and controversies of that period have long since sub- 
sided, is it not perfectly clear that after he destroyed 
the Spanish fleet, Admiral Dewey not only dealt with 
the Filipinos, until the army came out, substantially as 
Admiral Sampson and General Shafter did with the 
Cubans, but also that he did all he properly could to 
save President McKinley from the one great blunder 
of our history, the taking of the Philippine Islands? 



CHAPTER III 
Anderson and Aguinaldo 

Well, honor is the subject of my story. 

Julius Ccesar, Act. I, Sc. 2. 

THE destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay 
on May 1, 1898, ten days after the outbreak of the 
war with Spain, having necessitated sending troops to 
the Philippines to complete the reduction of the Spanish 
power in that quarter, Major-General Wesley Merritt 
was on May 16th selected to organize and command 
such an expedition. 

"The First Expedition," as it was always distin- 
guished, by the officers and men of the Eighth Army 
Corps, there having been many subsequent expeditions 
sent out before our war with the Filipinos was over, was 
itself subdivided into a number of different expeditions, 
troops being hurried to Manila as fast as they could be 
assembled and p operly equipped in sufficient numbers. 
The first batch that were whipped into shape left San 
Francisco under command of Brigadier- General Thomas 
M. Anderson, on May 25th, and arrived off Manila, 
June 30th. General Merritt did not arrive until July 
25th. It was General Anderson, therefore, who broke 
the ice of the American occupation of the Philippines. 

In his annual message to Congress of December, 
following, 1 summing up the War with Spain and its 

1 Congressional Record, December 5, 1898. 

46 



Anderson and Aguinaldo 47 

results, Mr. McKinley gives a brief account of the First 
Expedition. After recounting Admiral Dewey's vic- 
tory of May 1st previous, he states that "on the seventh 
day of May the Government was advised officially of 
the victory at Manila, and at once inquired of the 
commander of the fleet what troops would be required. " 
President McKinley does not give the Admiral's answer, 
though he does state that it was received on the 15th 
day of May. The Admiral's answer appears, however, 
in the Report of the Navy Department for 1898, Ap- 
pendix, page 98. It was: "In my best judgment, a 
well-equipped force of 5000 men. " But the President's 
message does state that he at once sent a "total force 
consisting of 641 officers and 15,058 enlisted men." 

The difference of view-point of the Admiral and the 
President is clear from the language of both. In 
recommending 5000 troops, the Admiral had said they 
would be necessary "to retain possession [of Manila] 
and thus control Philippine Islands." This counted, 
of course, on the friendship of the people, as in Cuba. 
"I had in view simply taking possession of the city." 
said Admiral Dewey to the Senate Committee in 1902. * 

The purpose of the President in sending three times 
as many troops as were needed for the purpose Admiral 
Dewey had in mind is indicated in his account of what 
happened. After describing the taking of Manila by 
our troops on August 13th, the presidential message 
says: 

By this the conquest of the Philippine Islands, virtually 
accomplished when the Spanish capacity for resistance was 
destroyed by Admiral Dewey's victory of May 1st, was 
formally sealed. 2 

1 See p. 2938, 5. D. 331 (1902). 

2 Congressional Record, December 5, 1898, p. 5. 



48 American Occupation of Philippines 

Admiral Dewey contemplated that we should merely 
remain masters of the situation out where he was until 
the end of the war. President McKinley set about to 
effect "the conquest of the Philippine Islands." The 
naval victory of Manila Bay having made it certain 
that at the conclusion of our war against a decadent 
monarchy we would at last have an adequate coaling 
station and naval base in the Far East, the sending of 
troops to the Philippines, in appropriate prosecution 
of the war, to reduce and capture Manila, the capital 
and chief port, raised the question at once "And then 
what?" 

The genesis of the idea of taking over the archipelago 
is traceable to within a few days after the destruction 
of the Spanish fleet. 

Within a few days after the official news of the battle 
of Manila Bay reached Washington, the Treasury 
Department set a man to work making a "Report on 
Financial and Industrial Conditions of the Philippine 
Islands." 1 The Interior Department also awoke, 
about the same time to possibilities of an El Dorado 
in the new overseas conquest. "In May, 1898," says 
Secretary of the Interior, C. N. Bliss, in a letter intended 
for the Peace Commissioners who met at Paris that 
fall, "by arrangement between the Secretary of War 
with this Department" — Mr. Bliss's grammar is bad, 
but his meaning is plain — "a geologist of the United 
States Geological Survey accompanied the military 
expedition to the Philippines for the purpose of pro- 
curing information touching the geological and mineral 
resources of said islands. " 2 This report, which accom- 
panies the Bliss letter, reads like a mining stock pros- 
pectus. That summer an Assistant Secretary of the 

1 Senate Document 169, 55th Cong,, 3d Sess. (1 
*Ib. 



Anderson and Aguinaldo 49 

Treasury, presumably echoing the sentiments of the 
Administration, came out in one of the great magazines 
of the period, the Century, with an article in which he 
said: "We see with sudden clearness that some of the 
most revered of our political maxims have outlived 
their force. * * * A new mainspring * * * has 
become the directing force * * * the mainspring of 
commercialism." 1 Of course, the writer did not 
mention that Manila is an out-of-the-way place, so far 
as regards the main-travelled routes across the Pacific 
Ocean, and also forgot that, as has been suggested once 
before, the carrying trade of the world, and the shippers 
on which it depends, in the contest of the nations for the 
markets of Asia, would never take to the practice of 
unloading at Manila by way of rehearsal, before finally 
discharging cargo on the mainland of Asia, where the 
name of the Ultimate Consumer is legion. Neverthe- 
less " Expansion" — of Trade, mainly — was the slogan 
of the hour, and any one who did not catch the conta- 
gion of exuberant allusion to " Our New Possessions" 
was considered crusty and out of date. People who 
referred back to the political maxims of Washington's 
Farewell Address, and the cognate set represented by 
the Monroe Doctrine, were regarded merely as not know- 
ing a good thing when they saw it. So on rode the 
country, on the crest of the wave of war. When Presi- 
dent McKinley sent the troops to the Philippines, their 
job was to hurry up and effect what his subsequent mes- 
sage to Congress describing their work called "the con- 
quest of the Philippine Islands. " That is, they were 
to effect a constructive conquest of the archipelago before 
Spain should sue for peace. It never seemed to occur 
to anybody at home that the Filipinos would object. 
If the country had, through some divine interposition, 

1 Hon. Frank A. Vanderlip, August, 1898 Century Magazine. 

4 



50 American Occupation of Philippines 

gotten it into its head that the Filipinos were quite a 
decent lot and really did object very bitterly, it would 
have risen in its wrath and smitten down any suggestion 
of forcing a government on them against their will. 
But nobody knew anything about them. They were 
a wholly new proposition. 

General Anderson was of course furnished with a 
copy of the President's instructions to his chief, General 
Merritt. They are quite long, and go into details- 
about a number of administrative matters that would 
necessarily come up after the city should surrender, 
such as the raising of revenue, the military commander's 
duty under the law of nations with regard to the seizure 
of transportation lines by land or sea, the protection 
of places of worship from desecration or destruction, 
and the like. The only portion of them that is essen- 
tial to a clear understanding of subsequent events is 
now submitted: They are dated Executive Mansion, 
May 1 8, 1898, and read in part 1 : 

president Mckinley's instructions to general merritt 

The destruction of the Spanish fleet at Manila, followed 
by the taking of the naval station at Cavite, the paroling 
of the garrisons, and acquisition of control of the bay, have 
rendered it necessary, in the further prosecution of the 
measures adopted by this Government for the purpose of 
bringing about an honorable and durable peace with Spain, 
to send an army of occupation to the Philippines for the 
twofold purpose of completing the reduction of the Spanish 
power in that quarter, and of giving order and security to 
the islands while in the possession of the United States. 

For the command of this expedition I have designated 
Major-General Wesley Merritt, and it now becomes my 
duty to give instructions as to the manner in which the 
movements shall be conducted. 

1 See p. 85, S. D. 208, 1900. 



Anderson and Aguinaldo 51 

The first effect of the military occupation of the enemy's 
territory is the severance of the former political relations 
of the inhabitants and the establishment of a new political 
power. Under this changed condition of things the in- 
habitants, so long as they perform their duties, are entitled 
to security in their persons and property and in all their 
private rights and relations. It is my desire that the 
people of the Philippines should be acquainted with the 
purpose of the United States to discharge to the fullest 
extent its obligations in this regard. It will therefore be 
the duty of the commander of the expedition, immediately 
upon his arrival in the islands, to publish a proclamation 
declaring that we come not to make war upon the people of 
the Philippines nor upon any party or faction among them, 
but to protect them in their homes, in their employments, 
and in their personal and religious rights. All persons 
who, either by active aid or by honest submission, co-operate 
with the United States in its efforts to give effect to this 
beneficent purpose will receive the reward of its support 
and protection. Our occupation should be as free from 
severity as possible. Though the powers of the military 
occupant are absolute and supreme and operate immediately 
upon the political condition of the inhabitants, the municipal 
laws of the conquered territory, such as affect private rights 
of persons and property and provide for the punishment of 
crime, are to be considered as continuing in force, so far as 
they are compatible with the new order of things, until they 
are suspended or superseded by the occupying belligerents ; 
and in practice they are not usually abrogated, but are 
allowed to remain in force and to be administered by the 
ordinary tribunals substantially as they were before the 
occupation. This enlightened practice is, so far as possible, 
to be adhered to on the present occasion. * * * The 
freedom of the people to pursue their accustomed occupa- 
tions will be abridged only when it may be necessary to do 
so. 

While the rule of conduct of the American commander- 
in-chief will be such as has just been defined, it will be his 



52 American Occupation of Philippines 

duty to adopt measures of a different kind if, unfortunately, 
the course of the people should render such measures in- 
dispensable to the maintenance of law and order. He 
will then possess the power to replace or expel the native 
officials in part or altogether, to substitute new courts of 
his own constitution for those that now exist, or to create 
such supplementary tribunals as may be necessary. In 
the exercise of these high powers the commander must be 
guided by his judgment and experience and a high sense of 
justice. 

While this document declares the purpose of our 
government to be a "two fold purpose/' viz., first, to 
make an appropriate move in the game of war, and, 
second, to police the Islands " while in the possession of 
the United States," it is wholly free from inherent 
evidence of any intention out of harmony with the 
policy as to Cuba. In fact when the city of Santiago 
de Cuba surrendered to our forces in July thereafter, 
and it became necessary to issue instructions for the 
guidance of the military commander there, exactly 
the same instructions were given him, 1 verbatim et 
literatim. But in respect of the Cuban instructions 
there was never any concealment practised or necessary 
because the Cubans had been assured by the Teller 
amendment to the resolutions declaring war against 
Spain that we had no ulterior designs on their country, 
and that, as soon as peace and public order were re- 
stored, we intended "to leave the government and 
control of the island to its people." The Cuban 
instructions were therefore frankly and promptly 
published in General Orders No. 101 by the War 

1 See General Orders No. 101, series 1898, Adjutant-General's Office, 
Washington, July 18, 1898, a copy of which accompanied the President's 
message to Congress of December, 1898, and may be seen at p. 783, 
House Document No. 1, 55th Cong., 3d Sess., 1898-9. 



Anderson and Aguinaldo 53 

Department, July 18, 1898, five days after they were 
received from the President, and were then translated 
into Spanish and spread broadcast over Santiago prov- 
ince without unnecessary delay. I remember poring 
over a Spanish copy of General Orders 101, at Santiago 
de Cuba, shortly after the fall of that city, which copy 
was one of many already posted about that city by 
direction of General Wood. The words "the powers of 
the military occupant are absolute and supreme and 
operate immediately upon the political condition of the 
inhabitants 11 never disturbed the Cuban leaders in the 
least, because they were read in the light of the dis- 
claimer contained in the declaration of war. On the 
other hand, the proclamation which the military com- 
mander in the Philippines was enjoined by his instruc- 
tions to publish " immediately upon his arrival in the 
islands," which arrival occurred July 25th, was not 
so published until after we had taken Manila, August 
13th, and then it copied only the glittering generalities 
of the instructions themselves, such as the part assuring 
the people that we had not come to make war on them 
and that vested rights would be respected, but it care- 
fully omitted the words about the powers of the military 
occupant being absolute and supreme, because when 
the army arrived it found a native government that had 
already issued its declaration of independence, was 
making wonderful progress against the common enemy, 
and was able to put up a right good fight against us also, 
in case we should deny them independence. x 

General Anderson arrived in Manila Bay, June 30, 
1898, with about 2500 men, and when General Merritt 
arrived, July 25th, we had about 10,000 all told, while 
the Filipinos had half again that many, and there were 

1 For a copy of this proclamation, see p. 86, 5. D. 208, 56th Cong., 
1st Sess. 



54 American Occupation of Philippines 

12,000 Spanish soldiers in Manila. General Anderson 
had not been long camped on the bayshore, under cover 
of the Navy's guns and in the neighborhood of Agui- 
naldo's headquarters, before he understood the whole 
situation clearly and wrote the War Department as 
follows : 

Since reading the President's instructions to General 
Merritt, I think I should state to you that the establish- 
ment of a provisional government on our part will probably 
bring us in conflict with insurgents. 

This letter is dated July 18, 1898. 1 

When General Anderson arrived in the islands on 
June 30th, the Washington Government was still wrest- 
ling with the angel of its announced creed about ' ' For- 
cible Annexation" being "criminal aggression," and Mr. 
McKinley had to get both that angel's shoulders on the 
mat and put him out of business before he could get his 
own consent to giving any instructions to his generals 
which might sanction their killing people for objecting 
to forcible annexation. Hence his early anxiety to 
avoid a rupture with the Filipino leaders. The first 
stage of this wrestling coincides in point of time with 
General Anderson's tenure as the ranking military 
officer commanding our forces in the Philippines, which 
was from June 30th until the date of General Merritt 's 
arrival, July 25th. As already made plain, the Presi- 
dent's instructions for the guidance of the military 
commander were entirely free from any land-grabbing 
suggestion. On the other hand, when General Ander- 
son left San Francisco for Manila, May 25th, there was 
already talk in the United States about retaining the 
Islands, if they were captured, for he so informed 

1 5. D. 208, p. 8. 



Anderson and Aguinaldo 55 

Admiral Dewey in the first interview they had after the 
transports which brought his command cast anchor 
near our squadron in Manila Bay on the last day of 
June. "I was the first to tell Admiral Dewey," says 
he, in the North American Review for February, 1900, 
"that there was any disposition on the part of the 
American people to hold the Philippines, if they 
were captured. The current opinion was setting that 
way when the expeditionary force left San Francisco, 
but this the Admiral had no reason to surmise." 

Relegated by the circumstances to his own discretion 
as to how he should act until Washington knew its 
mind, General Anderson's attitude in the outset rep- 
resented a " peace-at-any-price " policy, suffused with 
benevolent pride at championing the cause of the 
oppressed, but secretly knowing from the beginning 
that it might become necessary later to slaughter said 
"oppressed," should they seriously object to a change 
of masters. 

"On July 1st, " says General Anderson, in the North 
American Review article above quoted, "I called on 
Aguinaldo with Admiral Dewey." Of the Admiral's 
dealings with the insurgent chief prior to this time, the 
General says in this same article : 

"Whether Admiral Dewey and Consuls Pratt, 
Wildman, and Williams did or did not give Aguinaldo 
assurances that a Filipino government would be recog- 
nized, the Filipinos certainly thought so, probably in- 
fering this from their acts rather than from their 
statements." This last quoted passage was read to 
Admiral Dewey by a member of the Senate Committee 
in 1902, along with other parts of the magazine article 
cited, and he was asked to comment on the same. He 
said : 

"These are General Anderson's statements. They 



56 American Occupation of Philippines 

are very interesting, indeed ; I am here to make my own 
statements. " 

He had stated that he never did specifically prom- 
ise Aguinaldo independence, and the questioner was 
trying to show that his acts had amounted to as- 
surances and therefore had committed the Gov- 
ernment to giving the Filipinos their independence. 
Then Senator Patterson began another question, and 
had gotten as far as "I want to know whether your 
views — " when out came this, as of a sailor-man clearing 
decks for action: 

"I do not like your questions a bit. I did not like 
them yesterday and I do not like them to-day." So 
the Admiral's feelings were respected and the question 
was not pressed. There is no doubt at all that in the 
Philippines in the summer of 1898 the army turned the 
back of its hand to Aguinaldo as soon as it got there and 
baldly repudiated what the navy had done in the way of 
befriending the Filipinos. But both had acted under 
the authority of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army 
and Navy — the President. The Admiral's sensitive- 
ness on the subject ought to have been respected. And 
it was. 

By the time Admiral Dewey and General Anderson 
decided to call on "Don Emilio, " the day after the 
General's arrival, the unexpected intimations which the 
latter brought, as to the Washington programme for the 
Philippine revolutionists being different from that as to 
Cuba, had begun to get in its work on the former. Not 
being a politician, the gallant Admiral was there ready 
and able to carry out any orders his government might 
send him, whenever the politicians should decide what 
they wanted to do. But in the absence of orders, he 
began to trim his sails a bit, so as to be prepared for 
whatever might be the policy. Accordingly, before he 



Anderson and Aguinaldo 57 

and the General started out to pay their call on "Don 
Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy, President of the Revolution- 
ary Government of the Philippines and General in 
Chief of its Army" — as he had styled himself in his 
proclamation of June 23d, — the Admiral said, "Do not 
take your sword or put on your uniform, but just put 
on your blouse. Do not go with any ceremony. ' ' And 
says he, in telling this, "We went in that way. "* The 
reason of thus avoiding too much ceremony toward our 
"ally" claiming to represent an existing government 
which had lately declared its independence, is ex- 
plained by an expression of the Admiral's concerning 
said Declaration of Independence itself: "That was 
my idea, not taking it seriously. ' ' At that same hearing 
the Admiral explained with much genuine feeling that 
from the day of the naval battle of May 1st until the 
arrival of the army "these great questions " were coming 
up constantly and he simply met them as they arose 
by acting on his best judgment on the spot at the time. 
But what a terrible mistake it was not to take that 
Declaration of Independence of June 23d, seriously, 
backed as it was by an army of 15,000 men flushed 
with victory, and under the absolute control of the 
author of the Declaration! Of course the Declaration 
had been published to the army. Could its author 
have checked them by repudiating it even if he had 
wanted to? As Aguinaldo himself expressed what 
would happen in such a contingency, "They would fail 
to recognize me as the interpreter of their aspirations 
and would punish me as a traitor, replacing me by 
another more careful of his own honor and dignity." 2 
This Dewey-Anderson call on Aguinaldo was on 
July 1st. Admiral Dewey now began to foresee that 

1 6*. D. 331, p. 2976, Hearings before Senate Committee, 1902. 
2 S. D. 208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., 1900, p. 16. 



58 American Occupation of Philippines 

the Washington programme was going to put him in an 
awkward position. So he began to take Aguinaldo more 
seriously. On July 4th, he wired Washington : ' ' Aguin- 
aldo proclaimed himself President of the Revolution- 
ary Republic on July 1st." 1 It was on July 7th that 
Admiral Dewey captured 1300 armed Spanish prisoners, 
the garrison of Isla la Grande, off Olongapo, and turned 
them over to the forces of the Aguinaldo government 
because he had no way to keep them. 2 Was not that 
taking that government a bit seriously? How wholly 
unauthorized by the facts was this of "not taking it 
seriously," on the part of "The Liberator of the Fili- 
pinos," 3 the immortal victor of Manila Bay, who two 
months before had taught the nation the magnitude of 
its power for good, in a cause as righteous as the 
crusades of old, and more sensible! 

But to return to General Anderson's account in the 
North American Review of his call, with Admiral Dewey, 
on the insurgent chief : ' ' He asked me at once whether 
the 'United States of the North' either had, or would 
recognize his government. I am not quite sure as to 
the form of the question, whether it was 'had' or 

I would' ? In either form it was embarrassing. 1 ' General 
Anderson then tells of Aguinaldo's returning his call: 

II A few days thereafter he made an official call, coming 
with cabinet, staff, and band. He asked if we, the 
North Americans, as he called us, intended to hold the 
Philippines as dependencies. I said I could not answer 
that, but that in 122 years we had established no 
colonies. He then made this remarkable statement: 
' I have studied attentively the Constitution of the United 

1 Correspondence, War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 720. 

2 For Admiral Dewey's cable report of this, see Navy Dept. Report, 
1898, Appendix, p. no. For particulars, given by him subsequently, 
see 6". D. 331, 1902, p. 2942. 

3 S. D. 331, pt. 3, 1902, p. 2942, and thereabouts. 



Anderson and Aguinaldo 59 

States, and I find in it no authority for colonies, and I 
have no fear." General Anderson adds : " It may seem 
that my answer was evasive, but I was at the time try- 
ing to contract with the Filipinos for horses, fuel, and 
forage." 

While this history must not lapse into an almanac, 
it may not be amiss to follow these early stages of this 
matter through a few more successive dates, because 
the history of that period was all indelibly branded into 
Filipino memory shortly afterward with the red-hot 
iron of war. 

July 4th, General Anderson writes the Filipino can- 
didate for Independence inviting him to "co-operate with 
us in military operations against the Spanish forces." 1 
This was written not to arrange any plan of co-operation 
but in order to get room about Cavite as a military 
base without a row. In his North American Review 
article General Anderson says that on that same day, 
the Fourth of July, Aguinaldo was invited to witness a 
parade and review "in honor of our national holiday. " 
"He did not come, " says the article, "because he was 
not invited as President but as General Aguinaldo." 
An odd situation, was it not? Here was a man claim- 
ing to be President of a newly established republic 
based on the principles set forth in our Declaration of 
Independence, which republic had just issued a like 
Declaration, and he was invited to come and hear our 
declaration read, and declined because we would not 
recognize his right to assert the same truths. On subse- 
quent anniversaries of the day in the Philippines it 
was deemed wise simply to prohibit the reading of our 
Declaration before gatherings of the Filipino people. 
It saved discussion. 

July 6th, General Anderson writes telling Aguinaldo 

1 5. D. 208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., 1900, p. 4. 



60 American Occupation of Philippines 

that he is expecting more troops soon and therefore 
"I would like to have your excellency s advice and co- 
operation. " J 

July 9th, General Anderson writes the War Depart- 
ment that Aguinaldo tells him he has about 15,000 
fighting men, 11,000 armed with guns, and some 4000 
prisoners, 2 and adds : ' ' When we first landed he seemed 
very suspicious, and not at all friendly but I have now 
come to a better understanding with him and he is 
much more friendly and seems willing to co-operate." 

July 13th, we find Admiral Dewey also still in a co- 
operative mood. On that day he cables the Navy 
Department of the capture of the 1,300 prisoners on 
July 7th, mentioned above, which capture was made, it 
appears, because Aguinaldo complained to him that a 
German war-ship was interfering with his operations, 3 
the prisoners being at once turned over to Aguinaldo, 
as stated above. 

July 1 8th, is the date of the letter to the War Depart- 
ment in which General Anderson states that the 
establishment of a provisional government by us will 
probably mean a conflict with the insurgents. This was 
equivalent to saying that they will probably be ready 
to fight whenever we assert the "absolute and supreme " 
authority that the President's instructions had directed 
to be asserted by the army as soon as it should arrive 
in the Philippines. Yet in the fall of 1899, President 
McKinley said he " never dreamed" that Aguinaldo's 
"little band" would oppose our rule to the extent of 
war against it. It would have been more accurate if 
the martyred Christian gentleman who used those 
words had said he "always hoped" they would not, 

1 S. D. 208, p. 4. 2 Anderson only had about 2500 troops then. 
3 See Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. no; 5. D. 331, 1902, p. 
2942. 



Anderson and Aguinaldo 61 

instead of " never dreamed" they would. This letter 
of July 1 8th, informs the Department: 

Aguinaldo has declared himself dictator and self- 
appointed president. He has declared martial law and 
promulgated a minute method of procedure under it. 

July 19th, General Anderson sends Major (now 
Major-General) J. F. Bell, to Aguinaldo, and asks of 
him a number of favors, such as any soldier may proper- 
ly ask of an ally, for example, permission to see his 
military maps, etc., and that Aguinaldo "place at his 
[Bell's] disposal any information you may have on the 
above subjects, and also give him [Bell] a letter or pass 
addressed to your subordinates which will authorize 
them to furnish him any information they can * ■ * * 
and to facilitate his passage along the lines, upon a 
reconnaissance around Manila, on which I propose to 
send him." 1 All of which Aguinaldo did. 

Military training is very keen on honor. Talk about 
what the French call foi d'officier, — the "word of an 
officer" ! Did ever a letter from one soldier to another 
more completely commit the faith and honor of his gov- 
ernment, to recognition of the existence of an alliance? 
" In 122 years we have established no colonies, " he had 
told Aguinaldo. ' ' It looks like we are about to go into the 
colonizing business, " he had, in effect, said to Admiral 
Dewey, about the same time. 

July 2 1st, General Anderson writes the Adjutant- 
General of the army as follows: 

Since I last wrote, Aguinaldo has put in operation an elabor- 
ate system of military government. * * * It may seem strange 
that I have made no formal protest against his proclamation 
as dictator, his declaration of martial law, etc. I wrote such a 
protest but did not publish it at Admiral Dewey's request. 2 

1 Senate Document 208, 1900, p. 8. 2 lb., pp. 12-13. 



62 American Occupation of Philippines 

When he wrote this letter, General Anderson was 
evidently beginning to have some compunctions about 
the trouble he now saw ahead. He was a veteran of the 
Civil War, whose gallantry had then been proven on 
many a field against an enemy compared with whom 
these people would be a picnic. But things did not 
look to the grim old hero like there was going to be a 
square deal. So he put this in the letter : 

I submit, with all deference, that we have heretofore 
underrated the natives. They are not ignorant savage 
tribes, but have a civilization of their own, and although 
insignificant in appearance are fierce fighters and for a 
tropical people they are industrious. A small detail of 
natives will do more work than a regiment of volunteers. 

Of course, this slam at "volunteers" was a bit rough. 
But the battle-scarred veteran's sense of fair play was 
getting on his nerves. He foresaw the coming conflict, 
and though he did not shirk it, he did not relish it. 
He understood the "game," and it seemed to him the 
cards were stacked, to meet the necessity of demon- 
strating that forcible annexation, instead of being crim- 
inal aggression, was merely Trade Expansion, and that 
his government was right then irrevocably committing 
itself, without any knowledge of, or acquaintance with, 
the Filipinos, to the assumption that they were incap- 
able of running a government of their own. 

The next day, July 226., General Anderson wrote 
Aguinaldo a letter advising him that he was without 
orders as yet concerning the question of recognizing 
his government. But that this letter was neither a 
protest nor in the nature of a protest, is evident from its 
text: 

I observe that Your Excellency has announced your- 
self dictator and proclaimed martial law. As I am here 



Anderson and Aguinaldo 6s 

simply in a military capacity, I have no authority to recog- 
nize such an assumption. / have no orders from my govern- 
ment on the subject. z 

Yet General Anderson's letter to the Adjutant- 
General of the army of July 18th 2 uses the words 
"since reading the President's instructions to General 
Merritt, " etc., showing that he had a copy of them; 
and those instructions order and direct (see ante) that 
as soon as the commanding general of the American 
troops arrives he is to let the Filipinos know that ' ' the 
powers of the military occupant are absolute and supreme 
and immediately operate upon the political condition 
of the inhabitants. " A charitable view of the matter 
would be that, technically, those were Merritt's orders, 
not Anderson's. But the whole scheme was to conceal 
the intention to assume supreme authority and keep 
Aguinaldo quiet "until, " as General Merritt afterwards 
expressed it in his report, "I should be in possession 
of the city of Manila, * * * as I would not until then 
be in a position to * * * enforce my authority, in the 
event that his [Aguinaldo 's] pretensions should clash 
with my designs. " 3 

The same day that General Anderson wrote Agui- 
naldo his billet doux about the dictatorship, viz., July 
22d, he cabled Washington a much franker and more 
serious message; which read: "Aguinaldo declares 
dictatorship and martial law over all islands. The 
people expect independence. " The very next day, 
July 23d, he wrote Aguinaldo asking his assistance in 
getting five hundred horses, and fifty oxen and ox- 
carts, and manifesting considerable impatience that he 
had not already complied with a similiar request pre- 

1 5. D. 208, 1900, p. 9. 2 lb., p. 8. 

3 See page 40 of General Merritt's Report, War Dept. Report, 1898, 
vol. i., part 2. 



64 American Occupation of Philippines 

viously made "as it was to fight in the cause of your 
people.''' 1 - The following day, July 24th, replying to 
General Anderson's letter of the 226. wherein General 
Anderson had advised him that he was as yet with- 
out orders concerning the question of recognizing his 
government, Aguinaldo wrote: 

It is true that my government has not been acknowledged 
by any of the foreign powers, but we expected that the great 
North American nation, which had struggled first for its 
independence, and afterwards for the abolition of slavery, 
and is now actually struggling for the independence of Cuba, 
would look upon it with greater benevolence than any other 
nation. 2 

That cablegram of July 22d, above quoted, in which 
the commanding general of our forces in the Philippines 
advises the Washington government, "The people 
expect independence," is the hardest thing in the 
published archives of our government covering that 
momentous period for those who love the memory 
of Mr. McKinley to get around. 3 After the war with 
the Filipinos broke out Mr. McKinley said repeatedly 
in public speeches, "I never dreamed they would turn 
against us. " You do not find the Anderson cablegram 
of July 22d in the published report of the War De- 

1 S. D. 208, 1900, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 11. 9 lb., p. 10. 

3 The writer is certainly one of these, and while calling in question 
the wisdom and righteousness of our Philippine policy, he cannot refrain 
from avowing just here a feeling of individual obligation to Mr. Root for 
his exquisite tribute to the personal equation of Mr. McKinley, delivered 
at the National Republican Convention of 1904, which was, in part, 
as follows: "How wise and skilful he was. How modest and self- 
effacing. How deep his insight into the human heart. How swift the 
intuitions of his sympathy. How compelling the charm of his gracious 
presence. He was so unselfish, so genuine a lover of his kind. And 
he was the kindest and tenderest friend who ever grasped another's 
hand. Alas, that his virtues did plead in vain against his cruel fate. " 



Anderson and Aguinaldo 65 

partment covering the period under consideration. 
General Anderson addressed it to the Secretary of War 
and signed it, and, probably for lack of army cable facili- 
ties, got Admiral Dewey to send it to the Secretary of 
the Navy for transmission to the Secretary of War. z 
Certain it must be that at some Cabinet meeting on 
or after July 22, 1898, either the Secretary of the Navy 
or the Secretary of War read in the hearing of the Presi- 
dent and the rest of his advisers that message from Gen- 
eral Anderson, "The people expect independence." 
The object here is not to inveigh against Mr. McKinley. 
It is to show that, as Gibbon told us long ago, in speak- 
ing of the discontent of far distant possessions and the 
lack of hold of the possessor on the affections of the 
inhabitants thereof, "the cry of remote distress is 
ever faintly heard." The average American to-day, 
if told the Filipinos want independence, will give the 
statement about the same consideration Mr. McKinley 
did then, and if told that the desire among them for a 
government of their people by their people for their 
people has not been diminished since the late war by 
tariff taxation without representation, and the steady 
development of race prejudice between the dominant 
alien race and the subject one, he will begin to realize 
by personal experience how faintly the uttered longings 
of a whole people may fall on distant ears. 

We saw above that in a letter written July 21st, tne 
day before the telegram about the "people expect 
independence, " which letter must have reached Wash- 
ington within thirty days, General Anderson not only 
notified Washington all about Aguinaldo' s government 
and its pretensions, but stated that at the request of 
Admiral Dewey he had made no protest against it. 2 

1 See Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 117. 

2 S. D. 208, 1900, p. 13. 



66 American Occupation of Philippines 

Yet straight on through the period of General Merritt' s 
sojourn in the Islands, which began July 25th, and 
terminated August 29th, we find no protest ordered by 
Washington, and we further find the purpose of the 
President as announced in the instructions to Merritt, 
"The powers of the military occupant are absolute and 
supreme" throughout the Islands, not only not com- 
municated to the Filipino people, but deliberately sup- 
pressed from the proclamation published by General 
Merritt pursuant to those instructions. x 

Comments and conclusions are usually impertinent 
and unwelcome save as mere addenda to facts, but in 
the light of the facts derivable from our own official 
records, is it any wonder that General Anderson, a gal- 
lant veteran of the Civil War, and perhaps the most 
conspicuous figure of the early fighting in the Philip- 
pines, delivered an address some time after he came 
back home before the Oregon Commandery of the Loyal 
Legion of the United States 2 on the subject, "Should 
republics have colonies ? " and answered the question 
emphatically "No!" 

1 For the Merritt proclamation, see S. D. 208, p. 86. 

2 In 1906. 



CHAPTER IV 
Merritt and Aguinaldo 

There are no tricks in plain and simple faith. 
Julius Ccesar, Act IV., Sc. 2. 

MAJOR-GENERAL WESLEY MERRITT'S ac- 
count of the operations of the troops under his 
command in the First Expedition to the Philippines may 
be found in volume i., part 2, War Department Report 
for 1898. He left San Francisco accompanied by his 
staff, June 29, 1898, arrived at Cavite, Manila Bay, 
July 25th, received the surrender of the city of Manila 
August 13th, and sailed thence August 30th, in obedience 
to orders from Washington to proceed without unneces- 
sary delay to Paris, France, for conference with the Peace 
Commissioners. According to General Merritt's re- 
port, about the time he arrived Aguinaldo had some 
12,000 men under arms, with plenty of ammunition, 
and a number of field-pieces. The late lamented Frank 
D. Millet has preserved for us, in his Expedition to the 
Philippines, some valuable and intimate studies of this 
army of Filipino besiegers whom our troops found 
busily at work when they arrived in the Islands: 

It was an interesting sight at Camp Dewey to see the 
insurgents strolling to and from the front. Pretty much all 
day long they were coming and going, never in military 
formation, but singly, and in small groups, perfectly clean 

67 



68 American Occupation of Philippines 

and tidy in dress, often accompanied by their wives and 
children, and all chatting as merrily as if they were going 
off on a pigeon shoot. The men who sold fish and 
vegetables in camp in the morning would be seen every 
day or two dressed in holiday garments, with rifle and 
cartridge boxes, strolling off to take their turn at the 
Spaniards. 

The reader will readily understand that there were 
many times as many volunteers as guns. Mr. Millet 
continues : 

When they had been at the front twenty-four hours they 
were relieved and returned home for a rest. They generally 
passed their rifles and equipments on to another man and 
thus a limited number of weapons served to arm a great 
many besiegers. They had no distinctive uniform, the 
only badge of service being a red and blue cockade with a 
white triangle bearing the Malay symbol of the sun and 
three stars, and sometimes a red and blue band pinned 
diagonally across the lower part of the left sleeve. * * * 
Many of them * * * had belonged to the native volunteer 
force. * * * The recruits were soon hammered into shape 
by the veterans of the rank and file. * * * Their men were 
perfectly obedient to orders * * * and they made the most 
devoted soldiers. There was no visible Commissary or 
Quartermaster's Departments, but the insurgent force was 
always supplied with food and ammunition and there was 
no lack of transportation. The food issued at the front 
was mostly rice brought up in carromatas to within a few 
hundred yards of the trenches, when it was cooked by the 
women. * * * Each man had a double handful of rice, 
sometimes enriched by a small proportion of meat and fish, 
which was served him in a square of plantain leaf. Thus 
he was unincumbered with a plate or knife or fork and 
threw away his primitive but excellent dish when he had 
"licked the platter clean." It was noticeable that the 
insurgents carried no water bottles nor haversacks, and no 



Merritt and Aguinaldo 69 

equipments indeed, but cartridge boxes. They did not 
seem to be worried by thirst like our men. 

"Although insignificant in appearance, they are 
fierce fighters," wrote General Anderson to the Ad- 
jutant-General of the army in July. x 

General Merritt states in his report that Aguinaldo 
had " proclaimed an independent government, republi- 
can in form, with himself as President, and at the time 
of my arrival in the Islands the entire edifice of executive 
and legislative departments had been accomplished, 
at least on paper." 2 Of course at that time we were 
still officially declining to take Filipino aspirations for 
independence seriously, and preferred to treat Agui- 
naldo' s government as purely a matter of stationery. 
As a matter of fact, an exhaustive examination of the 
official documents of that period, made with a view of 
ascertaining just how much of that Aguinaldo govern- 
ment of 1898 was stationery fiction and how much was 
stable fact, has absolutely surprised one man who was 
out there from 1899 to 1905 (the writer), and I have 
no doubt will be interesting, as mere matter of po- 
litical necrology, to any American who was there 
"in the days of the empire" as the "ninety-niners" 
called it. 

Early in the spring of 1899, Mr. McKinley sent out 
the Commission of which President Schurman of Cornell 
University was Chairman, to try to stop the war. They 
bent themselves to the task in a spirit as kindly as that 
in which we know Mr. McKinley himself would have 
acted. They failed because the war was already on 
and the Filipinos were bent on fighting for independence 
to the bitter end. But they learned a good deal about 
the facts of the earlier situation. Speaking of these in 

1 5. D. 208, 1900, p. 13. 3 lb., p. 40. 



70 American Occupation of Philippines 

their report to the President 1 with especial reference 
to the period beginning with Aguinaldo's landing at 
Cavite in May, after describing how the Filipino 
successes in battle with the Spaniards finally resulted 
in all of them being driven into Manila, where they 
remained hemmed in, they say : 

While the Spanish troops now remained quietly in Manila, 
the Filipino forces made themselves masters of the entire 
island except that city. 

"For three and one half months," says General Otis 
in describing the facts of this same situation a }^ear 
later, "the insurgents on land had kept Manila tightly 
bottled [meaning while Admiral Dewey had been block- 
ading the place by water] * * * and food supplies 
w^ere exhausted." 2 "We had Manila and Cavite. 
The rest of the island was held not by the Spanish but 
by the Filipinos, " said General Anderson, in the North 
American Review for February, 1900. "It is a fact 
that they were in possession, they had gotten pretty 
much the whole thing except Manila," said Admiral 
Dewey to the Senate Committee in 1902. 3 

General Merritt took Manila August 13th, and 
sailed away for Paris August 31st, and only a week 
after that General Otis wired Washington (under date 
of September 7th) from Manila: "Insurgents have 
captured all Spanish garrisons in island [of Luzon] 
and control affairs outside of Cavite and this city. ' ' 4 

The recruiting by Aguinaldo of an army of 40,000 
men with guns within one hundred days after his little 
"Return from Elba" — "15,000 fighting men, 11,000 

1 Report First Philippine Commission, vol. i., p. 172. 

2 War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4. Otis report, p. 13. 
*S. D.331, 1902, p. 2941. 

4 Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 788. 



Merritt and Aguinaldo 71 

of them armed with guns," in fifty days, x which number 
had swelled to nearly 40,000 men with guns in another 
fifty days (by August 29th) 2 — is no more remarkable 
than his progress in organizing his government and 
making its grip on the whole island of Luzon effective 
in a short space of time. 

As all Americans who know the Filipinos know how 
fond they are of what government offices call "paper 
work," and how their escribientes 3 can work like bees 
in drafting documents, it might be easy to ignore 
Aguinaldo's various proclamations, already herein- 
before noticed in Chapter II., as representing merely 
"a government on paper," were there no other proof. 
But among the insurgent captured papers we found 
long afterward, there is a document containing the 
minutes of a convention of the insurrecto presidentes 
from all the pueblos of fifteen different provinces, on 
August 6, 1898, which throws a flood of light on the 
subject now under consideration. 4 This convention 
was held at Bacoor, then Aguinaldo's headquarters, a 
little town on the bay shore between Manila and Cavite. 
The minutes of the convention recite that its members 
had been previously chosen as presidentes of their 
respective pueblos in the manner prescribed by previous 
decrees issued by Aguinaldo (already noticed), and 
that thereafter they had taken the oath of office before 
Aguinaldo as President of the government, etc. They 
then declare that the Filipino people whom they speak 
for are "not ambitious for power, nor honors, nor riches, 
aside from the rational aspirations for a free and inde- 
pendent life," and "proclaim solemnly, in the face of 

1 May I9th-July 9th; see General Anderson's report to the Ad- 
jutant-General of the army of July 9, 1898, S. D. 208, p. 6. 

2 See Major J. F. Bell's report to Merritt of August 29, 1898, S. D. 
62, p. 379. 

3 Clerks. 4 See S. D. 208, pp. 101-2. 



72 American Occupation of Philippines 

the whole world, the Independence of the Philippines." 
They also re-affirm allegiance to Aguinaldo as President 
of the government and request him to seek recognition 
of it at the hands of the Powers, "because, " says the 
paper, "to no one is it permitted to * * * stifle the 
legitimate aspirations of a people" — as if Europe cared 
a rap what we did to them except in the way of regret 
that it did not have a finger in the pie. However, 
they were not only apprehensive, on the one hand, lest 
we might be tempted to take their country away from 
Spain for ourselves, but also, on the other hand, lest 
we might in the wind-up decide to leave them to Spain 
at the end of the war. That this last was not an idle 
fear is shown by the fact that during the deliberations 
of the Paris Peace Commission, Judge Gray urged, in 
behalf of his contention against taking the islands at all, 
that if Dewey had sunk the Spanish fleet off Cadiz, 
instead of in Manila Bay, and the Carlists had incident- 
ally helped us about that time, we would have been 
under no resulting obligation "to stay by them at the 
conclusion of the war." 1 When the presidentes in 
convention assembled as aforesaid got through with 
their whereases and resolutions they presented 
them to His Excellency the President of the Republic, 
Aguinaldo, who then issued a proclamation which re- 
cited, among other things: "In these provinces [the 
fifteen represented in the convention] complete order 
and perfect tranquillity reign, administered by the 
authorities elected" 2 according to his previous de- 
crees as Dictator, which decrees have already been 
placed before the reader. The proclamation claims 
that the new government has 9,000 prisoners of war 
and 30,000 combatants. The former claim no one 

1 Senate Document 148, 56th Cong., 2d Sess., 1901, p. 34. 
3 S. D. 208, p. 99. 



Merritt and Aguinaldo 73 

having any acquaintance with those times and condi- 
tions will question for a moment. As to the 30,000 
combatants, if he had 11,000 men armed with guns on 
July 9th and 40,000 on August 29th, why not 30,000 on 
August 6th? Of course, men without guns, bolo men, 
do not count for much in a serious connection like this 
now being considered. In November, 1899, at San 
Jose, in Nueva Ecija province, I heard General Lawton 
tell Colonel Jack Hayes to disarm and turn loose 175 
bolo men the colonel had just captured and was lining 
up on the public square as we rode into the town. But 
we are considering how much of a government the 
Filipinos had in 1898, because the answer is pertinent 
to what sort of a government they could run if permitted 
now or at any time in the future; and, physical force 
being the ultimate basis of stability in all government, 
when we come to estimate how much of an army they 
had when their government was claiming recognition 
as a legitimate living thing, we must remember that 
"It was just a question of arming them. They could 
have had the whole population. " x 

Now the great significant fact about this Bacoor 
convention of presidentes of August 6th — a week 
before Manila surrendered to our forces — is that in 
it more than half the population of the island of Luzon 
was represented. The total population of the Philip- 
pines is about 7,600,000, 2 and, of these, one-half, or 
3, 800,000 3 live on Luzon. The other islands may be 
said to dangle from Luzon like the tail of a kite. 
Taking the tables of the American census of the 
Philippines of 1903 (vol. ii., p. 123), as a basis on 
which to judge what Aguinaldo's claims of August 6th 

1 Admiral Dewey to Senate Committee, 1902, 5. D.331, 1902, p. 2940. 

2 7,635,426. See Philippine Census of 1903, vol. ii., p. 15. 

3 3*798,507. See Philippine Census of 1903, vol. ii., p. 125. 



74 American Occupation of Philippines 

amounted to if true, the population of the provinces 
thus duly incorporated into the new government and 
in working order on that date, was, in round numbers, 
about as follows: South of Manila: — Cavite, 135,000; 
Batangas, 260,000; Laguna, 150,000; Tayabas, 150,- 
000; North of Manila: — Bulacan, 225,000; Pampamga, 
225,000; Nueva Ecija, 135,000; Tarlac, 135,000; Pan- 
gasinan, 400,000; Union, 140,000; Bataan, 45,000; 
Zambales, 105,000. This represents a total of more 
than 2,000,000 of people. 

But Aguinaldo's claims of August 6th are not the 
only evidence as to the political status of the provinces 
of Luzon in August, 1898. Toward the end of that 
month, Maj. J. F. Bell, Chief of General Merritt's 
Bureau of Military Information, made a report on the 
situation as it stood August 29th, the report being made 
after most careful investigation, and intended as a 
summary of the then situation according to the most 
reliable information obtainable, in order that General 
Merritt might know, as far as practicable, what he 
would be "up against' ' in the event of trouble with the 
insurgents. * 

This report not only corroborates Aguinaldo's 
claims of August 6th, but it also concedes to the 
Aguinaldo people eight other important provinces — 
four south of the Pasig River with a total population of 
about 630,000, 2 the only four of southern Luzon not 
included in Aguinaldo's claim of August 6th, thus 
conceding him practically all of Luzon south of the 
Pasig; and it furthermore concedes him four great 
provinces of northern Luzon with a total population of 
nearly 600,000. 3 General Bell states that these last 

1 See Senate Document 62, 1898, p. 379. 

2 Albay, Camarines Norte, Camarines Sur, and Sorsogon. 

3 Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, Isabela, Cagayan. 



Merritt and Aguinaldo 75 

are "still in the possession of the Spanish," but prac- 
tically certain to be with the insurgents in the very near 
future. "Insurgents have been dispatched to attack 
the Spanish in these provinces," says the Bell report. 

In this same report Major Bell said: "There is not a 
particle of doubt but what Aguinaldo and his leaders 
will resist any attempt of any government to reorganize 
a colonial government here." 1 When the insurgent 
government was finally dislodged from its last capital 
and Aguinaldo became a fugitive hotly pursued by our 
troops, he started for the mountains of northern Luzon, 
passing through provinces he had never visited before. 
The diary of one of his staff officers, Major Villa, in 
describing a brief stop they made in a town en route 
(Aringay, in Union province) says : "After the honorable 
President had urged them [the townspeople] to be 
patriotic, we continued the march." 2 They certainly 
did "continue the march." The Maccabebe scouts, 
of which the writer commanded a company at the time, 
took the town a few hours later, Aguinaldo's rear- 
guard retiring after a brief resistance, following which 
we found, among the dead in the trenches, a major 
other than Villa. Certainly, to read this little extract 
from the diary of Aguinaldo's retreat is to feel the pulse 
of northern Luzon as to its loyalty to the revolution 
at that time, and is corroborative of these claims of 
Aguinaldo made in August, 1898, supplemented, as we 
have seen them, by General Bell's appraisal. 

As to the political conditions which prevailed in 
southern Luzon, particularly in the Camarines, in 
August and the fall of 1898, information derived from 
one who was there then would seem appropriate here. 

1 5. D. 62, p. 380. 

2 Diary of Major Simeon Villa, p. 1898, Senate Document 331, pt. 3, 
56th Congress, 1st Session, 1902. 



76 American Occupation of Philippines 

Major Blanton Winship, Judge Advocate's Corps, 
U. S. A., Major Archibald W. Butt, the late lamented 
military aide to President Taft, and the writer, lived 
together in Manila, in 1900, at the house of a Spanish 
physician, a Dr. Lopez, who had been a "prisoner" at 
Nueva Caceres, a town situated in one of the provinces 
of southern Luzon (Camarines) in the fall of 1898. 
Dr. Lopez had a large family. They had also been 
" prisoners" down there. No evil befell them at the 
hands of their "captors." They had the freedom of 
the town they were in. They had good reason to be 
pretty well scared as to what the insurgents might do to 
them. But they were never maltreated. The main 
impression we got from Dr. Lopez and his family was 
that the political grip of the Aguinaldo government on 
southern Luzon was complete during the time they 
were "prisoners" there. If anybody doubts the abso- 
luteness of the grip of the Revolutionary government 
on the situation in the provinces which were represented 
at the Bacoor convention of August 6, 1898, above 
mentioned, when the Filipino Declaration of Indepen- 
dence was signed and proclaimed, let him ask any 
American who had a part in putting down the Philip- 
pine insurrection what a presidente, an insurrecto presi- 
dent e, in a Filipino town, was in 1899 and 1900. He was 
"the whole thing." Even to-day the presidente of a 
pueblo is as absolute boss of his town as Charles F. 
Murphy is of Tammany Hall. And a town or pueblo in 
the Philippines is more than an area covered by more 
or less contiguous buildings and grounds. It is more 
like a township in Massachusetts. So that when you 
account governmentally for the pueblos of a given 
province, you account for every square foot of that 
province and for every man in it. For several years 
before our war with Spain, nearly every Filipino of any 



Merritt and Aguinaldo 77 

education and spirit in the archipelago belonged to the 
secret revolutionary society known as the Katipunan. 
This had its organization in every town when Dewey 
sank the Spanish fleet and landed Aguinaldo at Cavite. 
The rest may be imagined. 

By September, 1898, Aguinaldo was absolute master 
of the whole of Luzon. Before the Treaty of Paris was 
signed (December 10, 1898), in fact while Judge Gray 
of the Peace Commission was cabling President Mc- 
Kinley that not to leave the government of the Philip- 
pines to the people thereof " would be to make a 
mockery of instructions," Aguinaldo had become 
equally absolute master of the situation throughout 
the rest of the archipelago outside of Manila. 

Toward the end of July, 1898, our Manila Consul, 
Mr. Williams, who was one of our consular triumvirate 
of would-be Warwicks, or " original Aguinaldo men," 
of 1898, used to have nice talks with Aguinaldo about 
the lion and the lamb lying down together without the 
lion eating the lamb, and in one instance, at least, he 
goes so far as to represent Aguinaldo as willing to some 
such arrangement — e. g., annexation, or some vague 
scheme of dependence. But whenever we hear from 
Aguinaldo over his own signature, we hear him saying 
whatever means in Tagalo "Timeo Danaos et dona 
ferentes. " For instance, at page 15, of Senate Docu- 
ment 208, he writes Williams, under date of August 
1st, with fine courtesy: 

I congratulate you with all sincerity on the acuteness 
and ingenuity which you have displayed in painting in an 
admirable manner the benefits which, especially for me and 
my leaders, and in general for all my compatriots, would be 
secured by the union of these islands with the United States 
of America. Ah! that picture, so happy and so finished 
* * * This is not saying that I am not of your opinion 



7$> American Occupation of Philippines 

* * * You say all this and yet more will result from annex- 
ing ourselves to your people * * * You are my friend 
and the friend of the Filipinos and have said it. But why 
should we say it? Will my people believe it? * * * I 
have done what they desire, establishing a government 

* * * not only because it was my duty, but also because 
had I acted in any other manner they would fail to recognize 
me as the interpreter of their aspirations, and would punish 
me as a traitor, replacing me by another more careful of 
his own honor and dignity. 

Now that we know what was in the Filipino mind 
when General Merritt arrived in the Philippines, let 
us see what was in the American military mind out 
there at the same time. Says General Merritt: " Gene- 
ral Aguinaldo did not visit me on my arrival nor offer 
his services as a subordinate leader." We trust the 
reason of this at once suggests itself from what has pre- 
ceded, including General Anderson's dealings with the 
insurgent chief. The latter wanted some understand- 
ing as to what the intentions of our government were, 
and w T hat was to be the programme afterward, should 
he and his countrymen assist in the little fighting that 
now T remained necessary to complete the taking of 
Manila. Those intentions were precisely what Merritt 
was determined to conceal. "As my instructions from 
the President fully contemplated the occupation of 
the Islands by the American land forces, and stated 
that 'the powers of the military occupant are absolute 
and supreme and immediately operate upon the politi- 
cal condition of the inhabitants, ' I did not consider it 
wise to hold any direct communication with the insur- 
gent leader until I should be in possession of the city 
of Manila." 1 

1 See Merritt's Report for 1898, War Dept. Report, 1898, vol. i., 
pt. 2, p. 40. 



Merritt and Aguinaldo 79 

On one occasion General Merritt passed through the 
village of Bacoor where Aguinaldo had his headquarters, 
but, says Mr. Millet 1 in mentioning this, "They never 
met." After the taking of the city, General Merritt 
remembered that with some 13,000 Spanish prisoners to 
guard, and a city of 300,000 people, all but a sprinkling 
of whom were in sympathy with the insurgent cause, 
on his hands, and an army of at least 14,000 insurgents 
— probably far more than that — clamoring without the 
gates of that city, and only 10,000 men of his own with 
whom to handle such a situation, frankness was out of 
the question, in view of his orders from the President. 2 
Therefore, on the day after the city surrendered, 
General Merritt issued a proclamation, copying 3 ver- 
batim from Mr. McKinley's instructions {ante) such 
innocuous milk-and-water passages as the one which 
assured the people that our government "has not come 
to wage war upon them * * * but to protect them in 
their homes, in their employments, and in their personal 
and religious rights; all persons who, by active aid or 
honest submission, co-operate with the United States 
* * * will receive the reward of its support and protec- 
tion. " But he carefully omitted the words quoted 
above about the powers of the military occupant being 
absolute and supreme, "lest his [Aguinaldo's] preten- 
sions," to use General Merritt 's expression, "should 
clash with my designs." "For these reasons," says 
General Merritt (p. 40) , ' ' the preparations for the attack 
on the city were * * * conducted without reference 
to the situation of the insurgent forces. " 

Here General Merritt is speaking frankly but not 

1 Expedition to the Philippines, p. 61. 

2 "With 10,000 men, we would have had to guard 13,300 Spanish 
prisoners, and to fight 14,000 Filipinos," says General Anderson, 
North American Review for February, 1900. 

3 Senate Document 208, p. 86. 



80 American Occupation of Philippines 

accurately. He means he made his preparations with- 
out any more reference to the situation of the insurgent 
forces than he could help. As a matter of fact, their 
situation bothered him a good deal. They were in the 
way. For instance, there was a whole brigade of them 
at one point between our people and Manila. "This, " 
says General Merritt (p. 41), "was overcome by instruc- 
tions to General Greene to arrange if possible with the 
insurgent brigade commander in his immediate vicinity 
to move to the right and allow the American forces 
unobstructed control of the roads in their immediate 
front. No objection was made," etc. That reads very 
well — that about "arrange if possible," "no objection 
was made, " etc., — does it not? Nothing there through 
which "the lustre and the moral strength" of the mo- 
tives that prompted the Spanish war might be "dimmed 
by ulterior designs which might tempt us," 1 is there? 
It was stated above that General Merritt was speaking 
frankly in this report. He was. He probably did not 
know how General Greene carried out the order to 
"arrange if possible with the insurgent brigadier-com- 
mander. " But it so happened that there was a news- 
paper correspondent along with General Greene who 
has since told us. This gentleman was Mr. Frank D. 
Millet, from whom we have already above quoted, the 
correspondent of the London Times and of Harper's 
Weekly. General Greene had known him years before in 
the campaigns of the Turco-Russian war. Mr. Millet 
had been a war correspondent in those campaigns also, 
and General Greene was there taking observations. 
So that in the operations against Manila, Mr. Millet, 
being an old friend of General Greene's, known to be a 
handy man to have around in a close place, was acting 

1 Mr. McKinley's instructions to the Peace Commissioners, Senate 
Document 148, 56th Cong., 2d Sess., 1901, p. 6. 



Merritt and Aguinaldo 81 

as a civilian volunteer aide to the general. 1 Here is 
Mr. Millet's account of what happened, taken from his 
book, The Expedition to the Philippines : 

On the afternoon of the 28th [of July, 1898], General 
Greene received a verbal message from General Merritt 
suggesting that he juggle the insurgents out of part of their 
lines, always on his own responsibility, and without commit- 
ting in any way the commanding general to any recogni- 
tion of the native leaders or opening up the prospect of an 
alliance. This General Greene accomplished very cleverly. 

Mr. Millet then goes on to tell how General Greene 
persuaded one of Aguinaldo's generals (Noriel) to 
evacuate certain trenches so he (Greene) could occupy 
them, "with a condition attached that General Greene 
must give a written receipt for the entrenchments. " 
This condition, Mr. Millet says, was imposed by "the 
astute leader ' ' (Aguinaldo) . General Greene' s ' ' clever- 
ness" consisted in purposely failing and omitting to 
give the receipt, which Mr. Millet says "looked very 
much like a bargain concluded over a signature, and 
was a little more formal than General Greene thought 
advisable. " The key to this sorry business may be 
found in the first paragraph of General Merritt's instruc- 
tions to all his generals at the time : 

No rupture with insurgents. This is imperative. Can 
ask insurgent generals or Aguinaldo for permission to occupy 
trenches, but if refused not to use force. 2 

"I am quite unable to explain," says Mr. Millet 
(p. 61), "why we did not in the very beginning make 
them understand that we were masters of the situation, 

1 See General Greene's Report, W. D. R., 1898, vol. i., pt. 2, p. 72, 
where Mr. Millet's conduct in the assault on the city receives special 
mention. 

2 War Dept. Report, 1898, vol. L, pt. 2, p. 73. 

6 



82 American Occupation of Philippines 

and that they must come strictly under our authority. " 
The obvious reason was that a war of conquest to sub- 
jugate a remote people struggling to be free from the 
yoke of alien domination was sure to be more or less 
unpopular with many of the sovereign voters of a 
republic, and more or less dangerous therefore, like all 
unpopular wars, to the tenure of office of the party in 
power. So that in entering upon a war for conquest, a 
republic must "play politics," using the military arm 
of the government for the twofold purpose of crushing 
opposition and proving that there is none. 

The maxim which makes all fair in war often covers 
a multitude of sins. But let us turn for a moment 
from strategy to principle, and see what two other 
distinguished American war correspondents were 
thinking and saying about the same time. Writing to 
Harper's Weekly from Cavite, under date of July 16th, 
concerning the work of the Filipinos during the eight 
weeks before that, Mr. 0. K. Davis said: "The insur- 
gents have driven them [the Spaniards] back over 
twenty miles of country practically impassable for our 
men. * * * Aguinaldo has saved our troops a lot of 
desperately hard campaigning * * * . The insurgent 
works extend clear around Manila, and the Spaniards 
are completely hemmed in. There is no hope for them 
but surrender." Writing to the same paper under 
date of August 6th, Mr. John F. Bass says: "We 
forget that they drove the Spaniards from Cavite to 
their present intrenched position, thus saving us 
a long-continued fight through the jungle. " This gen- 
tleman did not tackle the question of inventing a 
new definition of liberty consistent with alien domina- 
tion. He simply says: "Give them their liberty and 
guarantee it to them." In the face of such plucky 
patriotism as he had witnessed, political casuistry about 



Merritt and Aguinaldo 83 

"capacity for self-government" would have hung its 
head. Yet Mr. Bass was by no means a novice. He 
had served with the British army in Egypt in 1 895, 
through the Armenian massacres of 1896, and in the 
Cretan rebellion and Greek War of 1897. His senti- 
ments were simply precisely what those of the average 
American not under military orders would have been 
at the time. After the fall of Manila he wrote (August 
17th): "I am inclined to think that the insurgents 
intend to fight us if we stay and Spain if we go. " 

There were 8500 American troops in the taking of the 
city of Manila, on August 13, 1898. The Filipinos were 
ignored by them, although they afterwards claimed to 
have helped. As a matter of fact, the Spanish officers 
in command were very anxious to surrender and get 
back to Spain. The Filipinos had already made them 
"long for peace, " to use a famous expression of General 
J. F. Bell. The garrison only put up a very slight 
resistance, " to save their face, " as the Chinese say, i.e., 
to save themselves from being court-martialed under 
some quixotic article of the Spanish army regulations. 
The assault was begun about 9.30 a.m., and early that 
afternoon the Spanish flag had been lowered from the 
flag-staff in the main square and the Stars and Stripes 
run up in its stead, amid the convulsive sobs of dark- 
eyed senoritas and the muttered curses of melodramatic 
Spanish cavaliers. Thanks to the Filipinos' three and 
one half months' work, the performance only cost us 
five men killed out of the 8500. The list of wounded 
totalled 43. Our antecedent loss in the trenches prior 
to the day of the assault had been fourteen killed and 
sixty wounded. So the job was completed, so far as 
the records show, at a cost of less than a score of Ameri- 
can lives. 1 

1 See War Dept. Report, 1898, vol. i., pt. 2, p. 58. 



84 American Occupation of Philippines 

As Aguinaldo's troops surged forward in the wake 
of the American advance they were stopped by or- 
ders from the American commander, and prevented 
from following the retreating Spaniards into Manila. 
They were not even allowed what is known to the 
modern small boy as "a look-in." They were not 
permitted to come into the city to see the surrender. 
President McKinley's message to Congress of Decem- 
ber, 1898, describes "the last scene of the war" as 
having been "enacted at Manila its starting place." 1 
It says: "On August 13th, after a brief assault upon the 
works by the land forces, in which the squadron as- 
sisted, the capital surrendered unconditionally." In this 
connection, by way of explaining Aguinaldo's treatment 
at the hands of our generals from the beginning, the 
message says, "Divided victory was not permissible." 
"It was fitting that whatever was to be done * * * 
should be accomplished by the strong arm of the United 
States alone." But what takes much of the virtue 
out of the "strong arm" proposition is that Generals 
Merritt and Anderson were carrying out President 
McKinley's orders all the time they were juggling 
Aguinaldo out of his positions before Manila, and giving 
him evasive answers, until the city could be taken by 
the said "strong arm" alone. For, as the message 
puts it, in speaking of the taking of the city, "By 
this the conquest of the Philippine Islands * * * was 
formally sealed." 

When General Merritt left Manila on August 30th, 
he proceeded to Paris to appear before the Peace Com- 
mission there. His views doubtless had great weight 
with them on the momentous questions they had to 
decide. But his views were wholly erroneous, and that 
they were so is not surprising. As above stated, he did 

1 Congressional Record, December 5, 1898, p. 5. 



Merritt and Aguinaldo 85 

not even meet Aguinaldo, purposely holding himself 
aloof from him and his leaders. He never did know how 
deeply they were incensed at being shut out of Manila 
when the city surrendered. In his report prepared 
aboard the steamship China, en route for Paris, he 
says: " Doubtless much dissatisfaction is felt by the 
rank and file of the insurgents, but * * * I am of the 
opinion that the leaders will be able to prevent serious 
disturbances," etc. (p. 40). If General Merritt had 
caught the temper of the trenches he would have known 
better, but he saw nothing of the fighting prior to the 
final scene, nor did he take the field in person on the day 
of the combined assault on the city, August 13th, and 
therefore missed the supreme opportunity to understand 
how the Filipinos felt. Says General Anderson in his 
report : 

I understood from the general commanding that he would 
be personally present on the day of battle. * * * On the 
morning of the 13th, General Babcock came to my head- 
quarters and informed me that the major-general command- 
ing would remain on a despatch boat. * 

Indeed, so reduced was Manila, by reason of the long 
siege conducted by the insurgents, that the assault of 
August 13th, not only was, but was expected to be, 
little more than a sham battle. Says Lieutenant- 
Colonel Pope, chief quartermaster, "On the evening 
of August 1 2th an order was sent me to report with two 
battalions of the Second Oregon Volunteers, under 
Colonel Summers the next day on the Kwong Hoi to the 
commanding general on the Newport, as an escort on his 
entrance into Manila. At the hour named, I reported 
etc." 2 As soon as Spanish "hone*" was satisfied, up 

1 War Dept. Report, 1898, vol. i., pt. 2, p. 57. 
3 Ib. t vol. i., pt. 4, p. 190. 



86 American Occupation of Philippines 

went the white flag and General Merritt was duly 
escorted ashore and into the city, where he received the 
surrender of the Spanish general. 

In the Civil War, General Merritt had received six 
successive promotions for gallantry, at Gettysburg, 
Yellow Tavern, Five Forks, etc., and had been with 
Sheridan at Winchester. So the way he ' ' commanded ' ' 
the assault on Manila is proof only of the obligations 
we then owed the Filipinos. They had left very little 
to be done. 

In his account of General Merritt *s original personal 
disembarkation at Cavite, Mr. Frank Millet acquaints 
his readers with a Philippine custom we afterwards 
grew quite familiar with and found quite useful, of 
keeping your shoes dry in landing from a rowboat on a 
beach by riding astride the shoulders of some husky 
native boatman. The boatmen make it a point of 
special pride not to let their passengers get their feet 
wet. Mr. Millet tells us that a general in uniform 
looks neither dignified nor picturesque under such cir- 
cumstances, and that therefore he will not elaborate on 
the picture, but that it is suggestive "more of the 
hilarious than of the heroic. ' ' Presumably when 
General Merritt went ashore on August 13th, from 
the despatch boat from which he had been watching 
the assault on Manila, to receive the surrender of the 
Spanish general, he followed the same custom of the 
country he had used on the occasion of his original 
disembarkation. So that in the taking of Manila, we 
were probably literally, as well as ethically, like General 
Mahone of Virginia as he is pictured in a familiar post- 
bellum negro story, according to which the general met 
a negro on a steep part of the road to heaven, told him 
that St. Peter would only admit mounted parties, 
mounted the negro with the latter *s consent, rode on his 



Merritt and Aguinaldo 87 

back the rest of the toilsome journey to the heavenly 
gate, dismounted, knocked, and was cordially welcomed 
by the saint at the sacred portal thus: "Why how 
d' ye do, General Mahone; jess tie yoh hoss and come 



CHAPTER V 
Otis and Aguinaldo 

Where people and leaders are agreed, 
What can the archon do? 

Athenian Maxims. 

MAJOR-GENERAL ELWELL S. OTIS and staff 
arrived at Manila August 21,189s. 1 He relieved 
General Merritt and succeeded to the command of 
the American troops in the Philippines, August 29th. 
Archbishop Chapelle, who was papal delegate to the 
Philippines in 1900, once said to the writer at Manila, 
in that year, that General Otis was "of about the right 
mental calibre to command a one-company post in 
Arizona." The impatience manifested in the remark 
was due to differences between him and the command- 
ing-general about the Friar question. The remark 
itself was of course intended, and understood, as hyper- 
bole. But the selection of General Otis to handle the 
Philippine situation was a serious mistake. He was 
past sixty when he took command. He continued in 
command from August 29, 1898, to May 5, 1900, a period 
of some twenty months. The insurrection was held 
in abeyance for some five months after he took hold, 
the leaders hoping against hope that the Treaty of 
Paris would leave their country to them as it did Cuba 
to the Cubans; and during all that time General Otis 

1 See his Report, War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 3. 

88 



Otis and Aguinaldo 89 

was apparently unable to see that war would be inevi- 
table in the event the decision at Paris was adverse to 
Filipino hopes. A member of General Otis's staff once 
told me in speaking of the insurrection period that his 
chief pooh-poohed the likelihood of an outbreak right 
along up to the very day before the outbreak of Febru- 
ary 4, 1899, occurred. Before the insurrection came he 
would not* see it, and after it came he — literally — did not 
see it; that is to say, during fifteen months of fighting 
he commanded the Eighth Army Corps from a desk in 
Manila and never once took the field. His Civil War 
record was all right, but he was now getting well along 
in years. He was also a graduate of the Harvard Law 
School of the Class of 1861, rather prided himself on 
being "a pretty fair jack-leg lawyer," and had a most 
absorbing passion for the details of administrative 
work. They used to say that the only occasion on 
which General Otis ever went out of Manila the whole 
time he was there was when he went up the railroad 
once to Angeles to see that a proper valuation was put 
on a then recently deceased Quartermaster's Depart- 
ment mule. When he left the Islands he remarked to a 
newspaper man that he had had but one " day off " since 
he had been there. Unswerving devotion to a desk in 
time of war, on the part of the commanding general of 
the army in the field, seemed to him an appropriate 
subject for just pride. This showed his limitations. 
He was a man wholly unable to see the essentials of an 
important situation, or to take in the whole horizon. 
He was known to the Eighth Corps, his command, as a 
sort of " Fussy Grandpa," his personality and general 
management of things always suggesting the picture 
of a painfully near-sighted be-spectacled old gentle- 
man busily nosing over papers you had submitted, and 
finding fault to show he knew a thing or two. However, 



90 American Occupation of Philippines 

he had many eminently respectable traits, and did the 
best he knew how, though wholly devoid of that noble 
serenity of vision which used to enable Mr. Lincoln, 
amid the darkest and most tremendous of his problems, 
to say with a smile to Horace Greeley: "Don't shoot 
the organist, he 's doing the best he can." 

Before General Otis relieved General Merritt, the 
latter had written Aguinaldo politely requesting him to 
move his troops beyond certain specified lines about the 
city, J and Aguinaldo had replied August 27th, agreeing 
to do so, but asking that the Americans promise to 
restore to him the positions thus vacated in the event 
under the treaty the United States should leave the 
Philippines to Spain. 2 August 31st, Otis notified 
Aguinaldo, then still at Bacoor, his first capital, that 
General Merritt had been unexpectedly called away, 
and that he, Otis, being unacquainted with the situation 
must take time before answering the Aguinaldo letter to 
Merritt of the 27th. On September 8th, he did answer, 
in a preposterously long communication of about 3000 
words, which says, among other things: "I have not 
been instructed as to what policy the United States 
intends to pursue in regard to its legitimate holdings 
here " ; and therefore declines to promise anything about 
restoring the insurgent positions in the event we should 
leave the Islands to Spain under the treaty. Comment- 
ing on this in the North American Review for February, 
1900, General Anderson says: "I believe we came to 
the parting of the ways when we refused this request. " 
General Anderson was right. General Merritt had on 
August 2 1st sent Aguinaldo a memorandum by the 
hand of Major J. Franklin Bell which promised: "Care 
will be taken to leave him [Aguinaldo] in as good condi- 

1 On August 20th. War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 345. 

2 lb., p. 5- 



Otis and Aguinaldo 91 

tion as he was found by the forces of the government. Ml 
In the r61e of political henchman for President Mc- 
Kinley, which General Otis seems to have conceived it 
his duty to play from the very beginning in the Philip- 
pines, it thus appears that he was not troubled about 
keeping unsullied the faith and honor of the govern- 
ment as pledged by his predecessor. His 3000-word 
letter to Aguinaldo of September 8th ignores Merritt's 
promise as coolly as if it had never been made. His 
only concern appears to have been to leave the govern- 
ment free to throw the Filipinos overboard if it should 
wish to. He peevishly implies later on that Aguinaldo 's 
requests in this regard were merely a cloak for designs 
against us (p. 40). But his real reason is given in a 
sort of stage " aside" — a letter to the Adjutant-General 
of the army dated September 12, 1898, wherein he 
explains: " Should I promise them that in case of the 
return of the city to Spain, upon United States evacua- 
tion, their forces would be placed by us in positions 
which they now occupy, I thoroughly believe that they 
would evacuate at once. But, of course, under the 
international obligations resting upon us * * * no 
such promise can be given." 2 In the sacred name of 
National Honor what of the Merritt promise? You 
only have to turn a few pages in the War Department 
Report for 1899 from the Merritt promise to the Otis 
repudiation of it. Yes, General Anderson was right. 
It was when General Otis practically repudiated in 
writing the written promise of his predecessor, General 
Merritt, that we "came to the parting of the ways" 
in our relations with the Filipinos. Let no American 
suppose for a moment that the author of this volume is 
engaged in the ungracious, and frequently deservedly 
thankless task of mere muck-raking. He never met 

1 War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, pp. 346-7. 2 lb. p. 335. 



92 American Occupation of Philippines 

General Otis but once, and then for a very brief official 
interview of an agreeable nature. He is only attempt- 
ing to make a small contribution to the righting of a 
great wrong unwittingly done by a great, free, and 
generous people to another people then struggling to be 
free — a wrong which he doubts not will one day be 
righted, whether he lives to see it so righted or not. 
General Otis's letter to the Adjutant-General of the 
army of September 12th, above quoted, shows that he 
was holding himself in readiness to carry out in the 
Philippines any political programme the Administration 
might determine upon, which would mean that he 
would afterwards come home and tell how entirely right- 
eous that programme had been. Had the Administra- 
tion hearkened back to Admiral Dewey's suggestion 
that the Filipinos were far superior to the Cubans, and 
decided to set before General Otis in the Philippines 
the same task it had set before General Wood in Cuba, 
we would have heard nothing about Filipino "inca- 
pacity for self-government. " General Otis would have 
taken his cue from the President, his commander-in 
chief, and said: "I cordially concur in the opinion of 
Admiral Dewey." Then he would have gone to work 
in a spirit of generous rivalry to do in the Philippines 
just what Wood did in Cuba. And the task would 
have been easier. Had the Administration taken the 
view urged by Judge Gray, as a member of the Paris 
Peace Commission, that "if we had captured Cadiz and 
the Carlists had helped us [we] would not owe duty to 
stay by them at the conclusion of the war," 1 and 
therefore we were not bound to see the Filipinos through 
their struggle, General Otis would have adopted that 
view with equal loyalty and in the presidential cam- 
paign of 1900, he would have furnished the Administra- 
1 Senate Document 148, 56th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 34. 



Otis and Aguinaldo 93 

tion with arguments to justify that course. This would 
have been an easy task, also, for two of Spain's fleets 
had been destroyed by us, leaving her but one to guard 
her home coast cities, and making the sending of re- 
inforcements to the besieged and demoralized garrison 
of Manila impossible. The native army she relied on 
throughout the archipelago had gone over bodily to the 
patriot cause, and there was no hope of successful 
resistance to it. But General Otis did not have the 
boundless prestige of Admiral Dewey and so volunteered 
no advice. As soon as the Administration chose its 
course, he set to work to prove the correctness of it. 
From him, of course, came all the McKinley Administra- 
tion's original arguments against doing for the Filipinos 
as we did in the case of Cuba. He was the only legiti- 
mate source the American people could look to at that 
time to help them in their dilemma. They were stand- 
ing with reluctant feet where democracy and its antithe- 
sis meet, and Otis was their sole guide. But the guide 
was of the kind who wait until you point and ask ' ' Is 
that the right direction?" and then answer ''Yes." 
Four days after General Otis sent his above quoted 
letter of September 12th, to Adjutant-General Corbin, 
Mr. McKinley signed his instructions to the Paris 
Peace Commissioners, directing them to insist on the 
cession of Luzon at least, the instructions being full of 
eloquent but specious argument about the necessity 
of establishing a guardianship over people of whom we 
then knew nothing. From that day forward General 
Otis bent himself to the task of showing the righteous- 
ness of that course. "I will let nothing go that will 
hurt the Administration, " was his favorite expression 
to the newspaper correspondents when they used to 
complain about his press censorship. Hypocrisy is 
defined to be "a false assumption of piety or virtue." 



94 American Occupation of Philippines 

The false assumption of piety or virtue which has 
handicapped the American occupation of the Philippines 
from the beginning, and which will always handicap it, 
until we throw off the mask and honestly set to work to 
give the Filipinos a square deal on the question of 
whether they can or cannot run a decent government of 
their own if permitted, is traceable back to the Otis 
letter to the Adjutant-General of September 12, 1898, 
ignoring General Merritt's promise to leave Aguinaldo 
"in as good condition as he was found by the forces 
of the government " in case we should, under the terms 
of the treaty of peace, leave the Islands to Spain. 

General Otis' s letter of September 8th to Aguinaldo is 
apparently intended to convince him that he ought to 
consider everything the Americans had done up to date 
as exactly the correct thing, according to the standards 
of up-to-date, philanthropic, liberty-loving nations 
which pity double-dealing as mediaeval; and that he 
should cheer up, and feel grateful and happy, instead of 
sulking, Achilles-like, in his tents; and furthermore — 
which was the crux — that he must move said tents. 
General Otis does not forget "that the revolutionary 
forces under your command have made many sacrifices 
in the interest of civil liberty (observe, he does not call 
it independence) and for the welfare of your people"; 
admits that they have "endured great hardships, and 
have rendered aid"; and avers, as a reason for Agui- 
naldo 's evacuating that part of the environs of Manila 
occupied by his troops: "It [the war with Spain] was 
undertaken by the United States for humanity's sake 
* * * not for * * * aggrandizement or for any national 
profit." After stating, as above indicated, that he 
does not yet know what the policy of the United States 
is to be "in regard to its legitimate holdings here," 
General Otis proceeds to declare that in any event he 



Otis and Aguinaldo 95 

will not be a party to any joint occupation of any part 
of the city, bay, and harbor of Manila — the territory 
covered by the Peace Protocol of August 13th — and 
that Aguinaldo must effect the evacuation demanded in 
the letter of General Merritt "before Tuesday the 
15th" (of September), i.e., within a week. Aguinaldo 
finally withdrew his troops, after much useless parleying 
and much waste of ink. 

There was some of the parleying and ink, however, 
that was not wholly wasted. But to properly appre- 
ciate it as illustrative of the fortitude and tact which the 
early Filipino leaders seem to have combined in a re- 
markable degree, some prefatory data are essential. 

Aguinaldo' s capital was then at Bacoor, one of the 
small coast villages you pass through in going by land 
from Manila to Cavite. From Manila over to Cavite 
by water is about seven miles, and by land about three 
or four times that. The coast line from Manila to 
Cavite makes a loop, so that a straight line over the 
water from Manila to Cavite subtends a curve, near the 
Cavite end of which lies Bacoor. Thus, Bacoor, being 
at the mercy of the big guns at Cavite, and also easily 
accessible by a land force from Manila, to say nothing 
of Dewey's mighty armada riding at anchor in the 
offing, was a good place to move away from. There it 
lay, right in the lion's jaws, should the lion happen to 
get hungry. Aguinaldo had reflected on all this, and 
had determined to get himself a capital away from 
"the city, bay, and harbor of Manila, " that is to say, to 
take his head out of the lion's jaws. General Otis's 
demand of September 8th that he move his troops 
out of the suburbs of Manila determined him to move 
his capital as well. He moved it to a place called 
Malolos, in Bulacan province. Bulacan lies over on the 
north shore of Manila Bay, opposite Cavite province 



96 American Occupation of Philippines 

on the south shore. Malolos is situated some distance 
inland, out of sight and range of a fleet's guns, and 
about twenty-odd miles by railroad northwest of Manila. 
Malolos was also desirable because it was in the heart 
of an insurgent province having a population of nearly 
a quarter of a million people, a province which, by 
reason of being on the north side of the bay, was sure to 
be in touch, strategically and politically, with all Luzon 
north of the Pasig River, just as Cavite province, the 
birthplace of Aguinaldo, and also of the revolutionary 
government, had been with all Luzon south of the 
Pasig. Should the worst come to the worst — and as 
has already been indicated, the insurgents played a 
sweepstake game from the beginning for independence, 
with only war as the limit — northern Luzon had more 
inaccessible mountains from which to conduct such a 
struggle for an indefinite period than southern Luzon. 
But while the Otis demand of September 8th decided 
the matter of the change of capital, Aguinaldo could not 
afford to tell his troops that he was moving them from 
the environs of Manila because made to. He was going 
to accept war cheerfully when it should become neces- 
sary to fight for independence, but he still had some 
hopes of the Paris Peace Conference deciding to do with 
the Philippines as with Cuba, and wished to await 
patiently the outcome of that conference. Besides, he 
was getting in shipments of guns all the time, as fast 
as the revenues of his government would permit, and 
thus his ability to protract an ultimate war for inde- 
pendence was constantly enlarging by accretion. The 
Hong Kong conference of the Filipino revolutionary 
leaders held in the city named on May 4, 1898, at which 
Aguinaldo presided, and which mapped out a pro- 
gramme covering every possible contingency, has already 
been mentioned. Its minutes say : 



Otis and Aguinaldo 97 

If Washington proposes to carry out the fundamental 
principles of its Constitution, it is most improbable that 
an attempt will be made to colonize the Philippines or 
annex them. 1 

On the other hand, the minutes of this same meeting 
as we saw recognized that America might be tempted 
into entering upon a career of colonization, once she 
should get a foothold in the islands. The programme of 
Aguinaldo and his people was thus, from the beginning, 
not to precipitate hostilities until it should become clear 
that, in the matter of land-grabbing, the gleam of hope 
held out by the American programme for Cuba was illu- 
sive. According to the minutes of the meeting alluded 
to, such a contingency would, of course, " drive them, the 
Filipinos * * * to a struggle for their independence, even 
if they should succumb to the weight of the yoke/' etc. 
Such a struggle, as all the world knows, did ultimately en- 
sue. That part of the parleying following Otis's demand 
of September 8 th (that Aguinaldo move his troops) which 
was not useless was this: In order to "save their face, " 
with the rank and file of their army, the Filipino Com- 
missioners asked General Otis "if I [Otis,] would express 
in writing a simple request to Aguinaldo to withdraw 
to the lines which I designated — something which he 
could show to the troops." 2 So, on September 13th, 
General Otis wrote such a "request, " and Aguinaldo 
moved his troops as demanded, but no farther than 
demanded. He wanted to be in the best position 
possible in case the United States should finally leave 
the Philippines to Spain, and always so insisted. Long 
afterward General Otis insinuated in his report that this 
insistance, which was uniformly pressed until after the 
Treaty was signed, was mere dishonest pretence, to 

1 S. D. 208, pt. ii., pp. 7, 8. 2 Otis's Report, p. 10. 

7 



98 American Occupation of Philippines 

cloak warlike intentions against the United States. Yet r 
as we have seen above, one of onr Peace Commissioners 
at Paris, Judge Gray, just about the same time, was 
taking that contingency quite as seriously as did Agui- 
naldo. And early in May, 1898, our Secretary of 
the Navy, Mr. Long, had cabled Admiral Dewey "not 
to have political alliances with the insurgents * * * 
that would incur liability to maintain their cause in 
the future." 1 Before moving his troops pursuant to 
the Otis demand of September 8th, the Otis "request" 
was duly published to the insurgent army, and as the 
insurgents withdrew, the American troops presented 
arms in most friendry fashion. "They certainly made a 
brave show," says Mr. Millet {Expedition to the Philip- 
pines, p. 255), "for they were neatly uniformed, had 
excellent rifles, marched well, and looked very soldierly 
and intelligent." "The withdrawal," says General 
Otis (p. 10), "was effected adroitly, as the insurgents 
marched out in excellent spirits, cheering the American 
forces." Absolute master of all Luzon outside Manila 
at this time, with complete machinery of government 
in each province for all matters of justice, taxes, and 
police, an army of some 30,000 men at his beck, and his 
whole people a unit at his back, Aguinaldo formally 
inaugurated his permanent government — permanent 
as opposed to the previous provisional government — 
with a Constitution, Congress, and Cabinet, patterned 
after our own, 2 just as the South American republics had 
done before him when they were freed from Spain, at 
Malolos, the new capital, on September 15, 1898. The 
next day, September 16th, at Washington, President 

1 Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 101. 

2 To say nothing of the "chariot and four, and a Tband of a hundred 
pieces, and everything in the grandest style," of which Admiral Dewey 
told the Senate Committee in 1902 (S. D. 331, 1902, p. 2972). 



Otis and A^uinaldo 99 



'£> 



McKinley delivered to his Peace Commissioners, then 
getting ready to start for the Paris Peace Conference, their 
letter of instructions, directing them to insist on the cession 
by Spain to the United States of the island of Luzon u at 
least. " x In other words, the day after the little Filipino 
republic, gay with banners and glad with music, started 
forth on its journey, Mr. McKinley signed its death- 
warrant. The political student of 191 2 may say just 
here, " Oh, I read all that in the papers at the time, or at 
least it was all ventilated in the Presidential campaign 
of 1900." Mr. McKinley's instructions to the Paris 
Peace Commission were not made public until after 
the Presidential election of 1900. To be specific, they 
were first printed and given out to the public in 1901, 
in Senate Document 148, having been extracted from the 
jealous custody of the Executive by a Senate resolution. 
It was not until then that the veil was lifted. By that 
time, no American who was not transcendental enough 
to have lost his love for the old maxim, ' ' Right or wrong, 
my country," cared to hear the details of the story. 
The Filipinos and "our boys" had been diligently 
engaged in killing each other for a couple of years, and 
the American people said, "A truce to scolding; let us 
finish this war, now we are in it." 

But to return from the death-warrant of the Philip- 
pine republic signed by Mr. McKinley on September 
1 6th, to its christening, or inauguration, the day before. 
Mr. Millet gives an intensely interesting account of the 
inaugural ceremonies of September 15th, which as 
Manila correspondent of the London Times and Harper's 
Weekly he had the good fortune to witness. Says he : 

The date was at last * * * fixed for September 15th. 
A few days before Aguinaldo had made a triumphant entry 
1 See p. 7, S. D. 148, 56th Cong., 2d Sess. 



ioo American Occupation of Philippines 

into Malolos in a carriage drawn by white horses, and there 
had been a general celebration of his arrival, with speeches, 
a gala dinner, open air concerts, and a military parade. 
Mr. Higgins (an Englishman), the manager of the Railway, 
kindly offered to take me up to Malolos to witness the 
ceremony of the inauguration of the new government. * * * 
The only other passenger was to be Aguinaldo's secretary 
* * * a small boyish-looking young man. * * * £ 

It seems there had been a strike of the native employ- 
ees of the railway up the road. 

Mr. Higgins calmly remarked to the secretary that, in 
his opinion, if the affairs of the Filipino government were 
managed in the future as they were at present, the proposed 
republic would be nothing but a cheap farce. The secre- 
tary timidly asked what there was to complain about. 

Then came a tirade from Higgins, ending with, " I am 
going to lay this * * * before Aguinaldo to-day, and I 
shall expect you to arrange an interview 7 for my friend 
and myself. " Then, turning to the astonished Millet, 
he said in English: "It does these chaps good to be 
talked to straight from the shoulder. Since they came 
to Malolos, the earth is n't big enough to hold them. " 

This scene on the train is, decidedly, as Thomas 
Carlyle would say," of real interest to universal history." 
Mr. Millet's Government was a lion about to eat a lamb, 
but the head of his nation, Mr. McKinley, clothed with 
absolute authority in the premises for the nonce, was 
balking at the diet. Now, Mr. Millet rather admired 
the British boldness, just as a Northern man likes to 
hear a Southerner talk straight from the shoulder to 
a "darkey." As soon as the era of good feeling was 
over, our people quit treating the Filipinos as Perry 

1 Expedition to the Philippines, p. 255. 



Otis and Aguinaldo 101 

did the Japanese in 1854, an d began calling them 
- 'niggers." In fact the commanding general found it 
necessary a little later to put a stop to this pernicious 
practice among the soldiers by issuing a General Order 
prohibiting it. But Mr. Millet's admiration would 
have been somewhat toned down had he known what 
we found out later. The real secret of Higgins's personal 
arrogance was this. The Filipino government needed 
his railroad in its business. During the war which 
followed, the insurgents long controlled a large part of 
this railway, from Manila to Dagupan, which was the 
only railway in the Philippines. The railway properties 
suffered much damage incident to the war, and — just 
how willingly is beside the question — the company 
rendered material aid to the insurgent cause. So much 
did they render, that when Higgins had the assurance 
later to want our Government to pay the damages his 
properties had suffered at the hands of the insurgents, * 
our government at Manila promptly turned his claim 
down. Subsequently the London office of his company 
actually inveigled the British Foreign Office into mak- 
ing representation to our State Department about the 
matter — obviously a very grave step, in international 
law. The claim was promptly turned down by Wash- 
ington also, and, happily, that "closed the incident." 
Having exploded Mr. Millet's bubble, let us resume 
the thread of his story: 

We reached the station [at Malolos] in about an hour 
and a half. * * * The town numbers perhaps thirty or 
forty thousand people. * * * From the first humble 
nipa shack to the great square where the convent stands, 

1 "Putting the road and accessories into the same state as they were 
on February 4, 1899," was the language in which Mr. Higgins formu- 
lated his demand in a letter to General Otis on Jan. 25, 1900. See 
War Dept. Record, 1900, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 516. 



102 American Occupation of Philippines 

thousands of insurgent flags fluttered from every window 
and every post. * * * Every man had an insurgent 
tri-color cockade in his hat. 



Then follows a detailed account of being introduced, 
after some ceremony, to Aguinaldo, w T ho is described 
as "a small individual, in full evening black suit, and 
flowing black tie. " Higgins made his complaint about 
the strikers, and Aguinaldo said, "I will attend to this 
matter of the strikers," and then changed the topic, 
asking if the visitors did not wish to attend the opening 
of the Congress — which they did. 

From Mr. Millet's account, it is evident that, like 
Admiral Dewey and most of the Americans who first 
dealt with the Filipinos except Generals Anderson, 
MacArthur, and J. F. Bell, he failed to take the Fili- 
pinos as seriously as the facts demanded. At that time 
the Japanese had not yet taught the world that national 
aspirations are not necessarily to be treated with con- 
tumely because a people are small of stature and not 
white of skin. Consul Wildman at Hong Kong at 
first wrote the State Department quite peevishly that 
Aguinaldo seemed much more concerned about the kind 
of cane he should wear than about the figure he might 
make in history. Wildman did not then know, appar- 
ently, that canes, with all Spanish-Filipino colonial 
officialdom, were badges of official rank, like shoulder- 
straps are with us. The reader will also remember the 
toothbrush incident hereinbefore reproduced, told by 
Admiral Dewey to the Senate Committee, in 1902. That 
incident, naturally enough, amused the Committee not a 
little. But we who know the Filipino know it was merely 
an awkward and embarrassed answer due to diffidence, 
and made on the spur of the moment to cloak some real 
reason which if disclosed would not seem so childish. 



Otis and Aguinaldo 103 

Misunderstanding is the principal cause of hate in 
this world. When you understand people, hatred 
disappears in a way strikingly analogous to the dis- 
appearance of darkness on the arrival of light. The 
more you know of the educated patriotic Filipino, the 
more certain you become that the government we 
destroyed in 1898 would have worked quite as well as 
most any of the republics now in operation between the 
Rio Grande and Patagonia. The masses of the 1 people 
down there, the peons, are probably quite as ignorant 
and docile as the Filipino tao (peasant) , and I question 
if the educated men of Latin America, the class of men 
who, after all, control in every country, could, after meet- 
ing and knowing the corresponding class in the Philip- 
pines, get their own consent to declare the latter their 
inferiors either in intelligence, character, or patriotism. 

But to return to the inauguration. Mr. Millet saw 
the inaugural ceremonies in the church, and heard 
Aguinaldo' s address to the Congress. Of the audience 
he says "few among them would have escaped notice 
in a crowd for they were exceptionally alert, keen, and 
intelligent in appearance/' Of this same Congress 
and government, Mr. John Barrett, who was American 
Minister to Siam about that time, and is now (19 12) 
head of the Bureau of American Republics at Washing- 
ton — an institution organized and run for the purpose 
of persuading Latin-America that we do not belong to 
the Imperial International Society for the Partition of 
the Earth and that we are not in the business of gobbling 
up little countries on pretext of " policing" them — said 
in an address before the Shanghai Chamber of Com- 
merce on January 12, ii 



He [Aguinaldo] has organized a government which has 
practically been administering the affairs of that great 



104 American Occupation of Philippines 

island [Luzon] since the American occupation of Manila, 
which is certainly better than the former administra- 
tion ; he has a properly constituted Cabinet and Congress, 
the members of which compare favorably with Japanese 
statesmen. 



The present Philippine Assembly had not had its 
first meeting when I left the Islands in the spring of 
1905. It was organized in 1907. In the summer of 
191 1, I had the pleasure of renewing an old and very 
cordial acquaintance with Dr. Heiser, Director of Public 
Health of the Philippine Islands, who is one of the most 
considerable men connected with our government out 
there, and is also thoroughly in sympathy with its 
indefinite continuance in its present form. The Doctor 
is a broad-guaged man likely to be worth to any gov- 
ernment, in matters of Public Health, whatever such 
government could reasonably afford to pay in the way 
of salary, and is doubtless well-paid by the Philippine 
Insular Government. He can hardly be blamed, 
therefore, for being in sympathy with its indefinite 
continuance in its present form. Doctor Heiser is a 
man of too much genuine dignity to be very much 
addicted to slang, but when I asked him about the 
Philippine Assembly, I think he said it w T as "a cracker- 
jack. " At any rate, I have never heard any legislative 
body spoken of in more genuinely complimentary terms 
than those in which he described the Philippine Assem- 
bly. I learned from him incidentally that their ''ca- 
pacity for self-government" is so crude, however, as yet, 
that the members have not yet learned to read news- 
papers while a colleague whose seat is next to theirs is 
addressing the house and trying to get the attention of 
his fellows, nor do they keep up such a buzz of conversa- 
tion that the man who has the floor cannot hear himself 



Otis and Aguinaldo 105 

talk. They listen to the programme of the public 
business. 

Some five years ago in an article written for the North 
American Review concerning the Philippine problem, 
the author of the present volume said, among other 
things: " During nearly four years of service on the 
bench in the Philippines the writer heard as much 
genuine, impassioned, and effective eloquence from 
Filipino lawyers, saw exhibited in the trial of causes as 
much industrious preparation, and zealous, loyal ad- 
vocacy of the rights of clients, as any ordinary nisi 
prius judge at home is likely to meet with in the same 
length of time. " l Any country that has plenty of good 
lawyers and plenty of good soldiers, backed by plenty 
of good farmers, is capable of self-government. As 
President Schurman of Cornell University, who headed 
the first Philippine Commission, the one that went out 
in 1899, said in closing his Founder's Day Address at 
that institution on January 11, 1902: "Any decent 
kind of government of Filipinos by Filipinos is better 
than the best possible government of Filipinos by 
Americans." The Malolos government which Mr. 
Millet saw inaugurated on September 15, 1898, would 
probably have filled this bill. Had the Filipino people 
then possessed the consciousness of racial and political 
unity as a people which was developed by their subse- 
quent long struggle against us for independence, and 
which has been steadily developing more and more 
under the mild sway of a quasi-ireedom whose princely 
prodigality in spreading education is marred only by its 
declared programme that no living beneficiary thereof 
may hope to see the independence of his country, and 
that the present generation must resign itself to tariff 
schedules "fixed " at Washington, there is no reasonable 

1 North American Review, January 18, 1907, p. 140. 



io6 American Occupation of Philippines 

doubt that the original Malolos government of 1898 
would have been a very " decent kind of government." 
All through the last four months of 1898, the two 
hostile armies faced each other in a mood which it 
needed but a spark to ignite, awaiting the outcome of 
the peace negotiations arranged for in September, 
commenced in October, and concluded in December. 
While they are thus engaged about Manila, let us turn 
to a happier picture, the situation in the provinces under 
the Aguinaldo government. 



CHAPTER VI 
The Wilcox-Sargent Trip 

A smiling, peaceful, and plenteous land 

As yet unblighted by the scourge of war; 

Where happiness and hospitality walk hand in hand 

And new-born Freedom bows to Law. 

Anonymous. 

IN the last chapter, we saw Aguinaldo's republic 
formally established at Malolos, September 15th, 
claiming jurisdiction over all Luzon. In Chapter IV., 
entitled "Merritt and Aguinaldo, " we saw the politi- 
cal condition of southern Luzon in August, 1898, and 
the following months, and verified the correctness of 
Aguinaldo's claims as to complete mastery there then. 
Let us now examine the state of affairs in northern 
Luzon in the fall of 1898. 

In Senate Document 196, 56th Congress, 1st Ses- 
sion, dated February 26, 1900, transmitted by Secre- 
tary of the Navy Long, in response to a Senate 
resolution, may be found a report of a tour of ob- 
servation through the half of Luzon Island which 
lies north of Manila and the Pasig River, made be- 
tween October 8 and November 20, 1898, — note 
the dates, for the Paris Peace Conference began Octo- 
ber 1st and ended December 10th, — by Paymaster 
W. B. Wilcox and Naval Cadet L. R. Sargent. This 
report was submitted by them to Admiral Dewey under 

107 



108 American Occupation of Philippines 

date of November 23, 1898, and by him forwarded to 
the Navy Department for its information, with the 
comment that it "in my opinion contains the most 
complete and reliable information obtainable in regard 
to the present state of the northern part of Luzon 
Island." The Admiral's endorsement was not sent 
to the Senate along with the report. It appears in a 
book afterwards published by Paymaster Wilcox in 
1 90 1, entitled Through Luzon on Highways and By- 
ways. The book is merely an elaboration of the 
report, and reproduces most of the report, if not all of 
it, verbatim. The book of Paymaster Wilcox may be 
treated as, practically, official, for historical purposes. 
The preface recites that in October, 1898, American 
control was effective only in Manila and Cavite, that 
the insurgents, under Aguinaldo, who had proclaimed 
himself President of the whole Archipelago, imme- 
diately after Dewey's victory, were in supposedly 
complete possession of every part of the Island outside 
of these two cities, that their lines were so close to the 
outposts of our army that their people could at times 
converse with our soldiers, and that General Otis's 
authority did not extend much beyond a three-mile 
radius from the centre of Manila, while Admiral Dewey 
held and operated the navy-yard at Cavite. "Even 
the country between Manila and Cavite was in the 
hands of Aguinaldo, so much so that our officers had 
been refused permission to land at any intermediate 
point by water, and were prohibited from traversing 
the distance by road." Wilcox and Sargent procured 
leave of absence from Admiral Dewey to make their 
trip. They went first to Malolos, but failed to get 
anything in the way of safe-conduct from Aguinaldo. 
He is described, however, as of "great force of charac- 
ter * * * and he dominates all around him with a 



The Wilcox-Sargent Trip 109 

power that seems peculiar to himself." Wilcox had 
seen him before at Cavite. "He adroitly read between 
the lines that the Government of the United States did 
not then, nor would it at any future time, recognize 
his authority, " says the writer. 

Our travellers left Manila, October 8, 1898, on the 
Manila-Dagupan Railway, for a place called Bayam- 
bang, which is the capital of Pangasinan province, about 
one hundred miles north of Manila. In Pangasinan * ' the 
people were all very respectful and polite and offered 
the hospitality of their homes." From Bayambang 
they struck off from the railroad and proceeded east- 
ward comfortably and unmolested a day's journey, to a 
town in the adjoining province of Nueva Ecija (Rosales) 
where they received a cordial reception at the hands of 
the Presidente (Mayor) — Aguinaldo's Presidente of 
course, not the Presidente left over from the Spanish 
regime. "At this time all the local government of 
the different towns was in the hands of Aguinaldo's 
adherents, " says the descriptive itinerary we are fol- 
lowing. The tourists were provided at Rosales by 
order of Aguinaldo with a military escort, "which was 
continued by relays all the way to Aparri" (the north- 
ernmost town of Luzon, at the mouth of the Cagayan 
River) . Paymaster Wilcox says he carried five hundred 
Mexican dollars in his saddle-bags, but used only a 
trifling portion of this amount, "for in every town my 
entertainment was given without pay." They went 
from Rosales to Humingan, in Nueva Ecija. At 
Humingan they were again entertained by the Presi- 
dente at dinner, with music following, and comfortably 
housed. The Presidente made many inquiries about 
"the War with Spain and their own future." Their 
future, as revealed by the raised curtain of a year later, 
was that their country was being overrun by Lawton's 



no American Occupation of Philippines 

Division of the Eighth Army Corps, the author of 
this volume having passed through this same town of 
Humingan in November, 1899, as an officer of the 
scouts used to develop fire for General Lawton's column. 
They journeyed eastward through the province of 
Nueva Ecija from Humingan to a little village (Puncan) 
in the foothills of the mountains they planned to cross. 
Of this place and the hospitality there, our traveller 
remarks: "I shall never forget the welcome of the 
local official" the Presidente. Thence they proceeded 
a few more stages and parasangs, northward over the 
Caranglan pass, into Nueva Vizcaya province, the 
watershed of north central Luzon, and thence down 
the valley of the Caga}^an River via Iligan and Tugue- 
garao to Aparri, being always hospitably entertained 
in every town through which they passed by the Presi- 
dente or Mayor of the town, the local representative 
of the Philippine republic. In the New York Inde- 
pendent of September 14, 1899, Cadet Sargent, in an 
article about this trip, gives the words of the new 
Filipino national Hymn, which he describes as sung 
with great enthusiasm everywhere he and Wilcox were 
entertained in the various towns. I desire to preserve 
a sample verse of it here. The music it is set to is 
much like the Marseillaise — quite as stirring: 

Del sueno de tres siglos 
Hermanos Despertad! 
Gritando "Fuera Espafia! 
Viva La Libertad!" 

which, being interpreted, means: 

From the sleep of three centuries 
Brothers, awake! 
Crying "Out with Spain! 
Live Liberty!" 



The Wilcox-Sargent Trip in 

Had another Sargent and another Wilcox made a 
similar trip through the provinces of southern Luzon 
about this same time, under similar friendly auspices, 
before we turned friendship to hate and fear and misery, 
in the name of Benevolent Assimilation, they would, 
we now know, have found similar conditions. 

Some suspicions were aroused on one or two occasions, 
but once the local authorities became convinced that 
the trip was being made by consent of "The Illustrious 
Presidente" (Aguinaldo — "El Egregio Presidente" is 
the Spanish of it) all was sunshine again. . The Mayor 
of each town — the Presidente — would receive from 
the escort coming with them from the last town they 
had stopped at, a letter from the Mayor, or Presi- 
dente, of said last town; the old escort would return 
to their town, and a new one would be provided to give 
them safe-conduct to the next town. This was no 
new-fangled scheme of Aguinaldo' s. It was an ancient 
custom of the Spanish Government,, and was an ideal 
nucleus of administration for the new government. 
Curiously enough, the army knew practically nothing 
of this trip in the days of the early fighting. All that 
country was to us a terra incognita, until overrun by 
Captain Bacthelor, with a part of the 25th Infantry 
in the fall of 1899, the following year. So was the 
rest of the archipelago a like terra incognita, until 
likewise slowly conquered by hard fighting. That is 
why we so utterly failed to understand what a wonder- 
fully complete "going concern" Aguinaldo' s govern- 
ment had become throughout the Philippine archipelago 
before the Treaty of Paris was signed. Descending 
from the watershed of north central Luzon in the 
province of Nueva Viscaya already mentioned, our 
travellers reached the town of Carig, in the foothills 
which fringe that side of the watershed. There they 



ii2 American Occupation of Philippines 

were met by Simeon Villa, military commander of 
Isabela province, the man who was chief of staff to 
Aguinaldo afterwards, and was captured by General 
Funs ton along with Aguinaldo in the spring of 1901. 
Villa's immediate superior was Colonel Tirona, at 
Aparri, the colonel commanding all the insurgent- 
forces of the Cagayan valley. Villa was accompanied 
by his aide, Lieutenant Ventura Guzman. The latter 
is an old acquaintance of the author of the present 
volume, who tried him afterwards, in 1901, for playing 
a minor part in the murder of an officer of the Spanish 
army committed under Villa's orders just prior to, or 
about the time of, the Wilcox-Sargent visit. He was 
found guilty, and sentenced, but later liberated under 
President Roosevelt's amnesty of 1902. He was guilty, 
but the deceased, so the people in the Cagayan valley 
used to say, in being tortured to death, got only the 
same sort of medicine he had often administered there- 
abouts. At any rate, that was the broad theory of 
the amnesty in wiping out all these old cases. Villa 
was a Tagal and had come up from Manila with 
she expedition commanded by Colonel Tirona, which 
expedition was fitted out with guns furnished Agui- 
naldo by Admiral Dewey, or, if not furnished, permitted 
to be furnished. But Guzman was a member of one 
of the wealthiest and most influential native families 
of that province (Isabela). General Otis's reports are 
full of the most inexcusable blunders about how "the 
Tagals" took possession of the various provinces and 
made the people do this or that. Villa's relations with 
Guzman were just about those of a New Yorker or a 
Bostonian sent up to Vermont in the days of the Ameri- 
can Revolution to help organize the resistance there, 
in conjunction with one of the local leaders of the 
patriot cause in the Green Mountain State. Both 



The Wilcox-Sargent Trip 113 

were members of the Katipunan, the Filipino Revolu- 
tionary Secret Society, an organization patterned after 
Masonry, membership in which was always treated by 
the Spaniards as sedition, and usually visited with 
capital punishment. Nearly every Filipino of any 
spirit belonged to it on May 1, 1898, the date of the 
naval battle of Manila Bay. It is the all-pervading 
completeness of this organization at that time — it 
could give old Tammany Hall cards and spades — 
which explains the astonishing rapidity of Aguinaldo's 
political success, i.e., the astonishing rapidity with 
which the Malolos Government acquired control of 
Luzon between May and October, 1898. Their caba- 
listic watchword was "Paisano" (fellow-countryman), 
their battle cry "Independence." In the fall of 1898, 
at the time of this Wilcox-Sargent trip through Luzon, 
the Filipinos really "had tasted the sweets of Inde- 
pendence," to use the phrase of the people of Iloilo in 
declining on that ground to surrender to General Miller 
in December thereafter and electing the arbitrament 
of war. The writer is perhaps as familiar with the 
history of that Cagayan valley as almost any other 
American. It is true there were cruelties practised 
by the Filipinos on the Spaniards, But they were 
ebullitions of revenge for three centuries of tyranny. 
They do not prove unfitness for self-government. I for 
one prefer to follow the example set by the Roosevelt 
amnesty of 1902, and draw the veil over all those 
matters. With the Spaniards it was a case of Sauve 
qui peut. With the Filipinos, it was a case, as old 
man Dimas Guzman, father to this Lieutenant Ven- 
tura we have just met, used to put it, of Me las vais 
a pagar, which, liberally interpreted, means, "The 
bad quarter of an hour has arrived for the Spaniards. 
The day of reckoning has come." I sentenced both 



ii4 American Occupation of Philippines 

Dimas and Ventura to life imprisonment for being 
accessory to the murder of the Spanish officer above 
named, Lieutenant Piera. Villa officiated as arch- 
fiend of the gruesome occasion. I am quite sure I 
would have hung Villa without any compunction at 
that time, if I could have gotten hold of him. I tried 
to get hold of him, but Governor Taft's Attorney- 
General, Mr. Wilfley, wrote me that Villa was some- 
where over on the mainland of Asia on British territory, 
and extradition would involve application to the Lon- 
don Foreign Office. The intimation was that we had 
trouble enough of our own without borrowing any from 
feuds that had existed under our predecessors in sover- 
eignty. I have understood that Villa is now prac- 
tising medicine in Manila. More than one officer of 
the American army that I know, afterwards did things 
to the Filipinos almost as cruel as Villa did to that 
unhappy Spanish officer, Lieutenant Piera. On the 
whole, I think President Roosevelt acted wisely and 
humanely in wiping the slate. We had new problems 
to deal with, and were not bound to handicap our- 
selves with the old ones left over from the Spanish 
regime. 

It appears that Villa became a little suspicious of 
the travellers. He detained them at Carig seven days. 
Finally there came a telegram from his chief at Aparri, 
Colonel Tirona, to our two travellers, which read: 
' ' I salute you affectionately, and authorize Villa to 
accompany you to Iligan. " At Iligan, the capital of 
Isabela province, the travellers were lavishly enter- 
tained. They were given a grand baile (ball) and 
fiesta (feast), a kind of dinner-dance, we would call it. 
To the light Messrs. Sargent and Wilcox throw on the 
then universal acknowledgment of the authority of 
the Aguinaldo government, and the perfect tranquillity 



The Wilcox-Sargent Trip 115 

and public order maintained under it, in the Cagayan 
valley, I may add that as judge of that district in 
1 90 1 -2 there came before me a number of cases in the 
trial of which the fact would be brought out of this or 
that difference among the local authorities having been 
referred to the Malolos Government for settlement. 
And they always waited until they heard from it. The 
doubting Thomas will attribute this to the partiality 
of the Filipinos to procrastination in general. I know 
it was due to the hearty co-operation of the people 
with, and their loyalty to, the then existing government, 
and to their pride in it. Mr. Sargent tells a character- 
istic story of Villa, whose vengeful feeling toward the 
Spaniards showed on all occasions. The former Spanish 
governor of the province was of course a prisoner in 
Villa's custody. Villa had the ex- governor brought 
in, for the travellers to see him, and remarked, in his 
presence to them, "This is the man who robbed this 
province of $25,000 during the last year of his office." 
From Iligan our travellers proceeded to Aparri, cor- 
dially received everywhere, and finding the country in 
fact, as Aguinaldo always claimed in his proclama- 
tions of that period seeking recognition of his govern- 
ment by the Powers, in a state of profound peace and 
tranquillity — free from brigandage and the like. At 
Aparri the visitors were cordially welcomed by Colonel 
Tirona, and much feted. While they were there, 
Tirona transferred his authority to a civil regime. 
Says Paymaster Wilcox: 

The steamer Saturnus, which had left the harbor the 
day before our arrival, brought news from Hong Kong 
papers that the Senators from the United States at the Con- 
gress at Paris favored the independence of the islands with 
an American protectorate. Colonel Tirona considered the 



n6 American Occupation of Philippines 

information of sufficient reliability to justify him in regard- 
ing Philippine Independence as assured, and warfare in 
the Islands at an end. 

He then goes on to describe the inauguration of civil 
government in Cagayan province. I hope all this 
will not weary the American reader. It was vividly 
interesting to me when I read it for the first time 
thirteen years afterward, in 191 1, because it was such 
unexpected information, so surprising. It will be 
equally interesting to all other Americans who partici- 
pated in putting dow T n the subsequent insurrection 
and in setting up the Taft civil government in that 
same valley three years later. I was in that town, for 
a similar purpose, with Governor Taft in 1901, after 
a bloody war which almost certainly would not have 
occurred had the Paris Peace Commission known the 
conditions then existing, just like this, all over Luzon 
and the Visayan Islands. Of course the Southern 
Islands were a little slower. But as Luzon goes, so 
go the rest. The rest of the archipelago is but the tail 
to the Luzon kite. Luzon contains 4,000,000 of the 
8,000,000 people out there, and Manila is to the Filipino 
people what Paris is to the French and to France. 
Luzon is about the size of Ohio, and the other six 
islands that really matter, x are in size mere little Con- 
necticuts and Rhode Islands, and in population mere 
Arizonas or New Mexicos. Describing the ceremonies 
of the inauguration of civil government in Cagayan, 
the Wilcox-Sargent report to Admiral Dewey says: 

The Presidentes of all the towns in the province were 
present at the ceremony. * * * Colonel Tirona made a 
short speech. * * * He then handed the staff of office to 

1 The six main Visayan Islands. Mohammedan Mindanao is always 
dealt with in this book as a separate and distinct problem. 



The Wilcox-Sargent Trip 117 

the man who had been elected " Jefe Provincial" [Governor 
of the Province]. This officer also made a speech in which 
he thanked the military forces * * * and assured them 
that the work they had begun would be perpetuated by the 
people, where every man, woman, and child stood ready to 
take up arms to defend their newly won liberty and to resist 
with the last drop of their blood the attempt of any nation 
whatever to bring them back to their former state of dependence. 
He then knelt, placed his hand on an open Bible, and took 
the oath of office. z 

Does not such language in an official report made by 
officers of the navy to Admiral Dewey in November, 
1898, show an undercurrent of deep feeling at the posi- 
tion the Administration had put Admiral Dewey in 
with Aguinaldo, when it decided to take the Philippines, 
and accordingly sent out an army whose generals 
ignored his protege? 

The speech of the provincial governor was followed, 
says the Wilcox-Sargent report (same page) by speeches 
from "the other officers who constitute the provincial 
government, the heads of the three departments — 
justice, police, and internal revenue. Every town in 
this province has the same organization. " Article III. 
of Aguinaldo's decree of June 18th, previous, providing 
an organic law or constitution for his provisional 
government (see Chapter II., ante) had provided pre- 
cisely the organization which Wilcox and Sargent thus 
saw working at Aparri and throughout the Cagayan 
valley in October, 1898. The importance of all this 
to the question of how the Filipinos feel toward us 
to-day, in this year of grace, 191 2, and to the element 
of righteousness there is in that feeling, is too obvious 
to need comment. Americans interested in business 
in the Philippines come back to this country from time 

1 Senate Document 106, 56th Cong., 1st. Sess., p. 14. 



n8 American Occupation of Philippines 

to time and give out interviews in the papers declaring 
that the Filipinos do not want independence. What 
they really mean is that it makes no difference whether 
they want it or not, they are not going to get it. And 
it is precisely these Americans, and their business 
associates in the United States, who have gotten 
through Congress the legislation which enables them to 
give the Filipino just half of what he got ten years ago 
for his hemp, and other like legislation, and the Filipinos 
know it. The gulf in the Philippines between the 
dominant and the subject race will continue to widen 
as the years go by, so long as indirect taxation without 
representation continues to be perpetrated at Washing- 
ton for the benefit of special interests having a powerful 
lobby. If the American people themselves are groaning 
under this very sort of thing, and apparently unable to 
help themselves, what is the a priori probability as 
to our voteless and therefore defenceless little brown 
brother. Like the sheep before the shearer, he is 
dumb. But to return to our travellers and their 
journey. 



A Norwegian steamer came into port [meaning the harbor 
of Aparri] that afternoon, and this seemed our only hope. 
She was chartered by two Chinamen * * *. At first 
they refused us permission to embark, and declined to put 
in at any port on the west coast. No sooner was this 
related to Colonel Tirona than he sent notice that the ship 
could not clear without taking us and making a landing 
where we desired. This argument was convincing. 

Colonel Tirona provided them with a letter addressed 
to Colonel Tino at Vigan, the chief town of the west 
coast of Luzon and the capital of the province of Ilocos 
Sur, which province fronts the China Sea. Messrs. 
Wilcox and Sargent proceeded aboard the Norwegian 



The Wilcox-Sargent Trip 119 

steamer from Aparri westward, doubling the northwest 
corner of Luzon, and steaming thence due south to the 
nearest port. Vigan was the Filipino military head- 
quarters of the western half of northern Luzon, just 
as Aparri was at the same time of the eastern half. 
On the west coast the travellers were treated always 
courteously, but with considerable suspicion. The 
explanation is easy. That region is in closer touch with 
Manila, and with what is going on and may be learned 
at the capital, than is the Cagayan valley which our 
tourists had just left. They bade the commanding 
officer at Vigan good-bye, November 13, 1898. Passing 
south through Namacpacan (which the command I was 
with took a year or so later) , they came to San Fernando 
de Union, some twenty miles farther south along the 
coast road. Here they met Colonel Tino and presented 
their letter from Tirona. He gave them a dinner, of 
course. How a Filipino does love to entertain, and 
make you enjoy yourself! Talk about your "true 
Southern hospitality"! You get it there. " Speeches 
were made, and great things promised by the Philippine 
republic in the near future" says Mr. Wilcox. After 
the dinner and speech-making came the inevitable 
dance. After that Colonel Tino started them off on 
their journey southward toward Manila duly provided 
with carriages. Passing Aringay on November 18, 
1898 1 our travellers finally reached Dagupan, the 
northern terminus of the Manila-Dagupan Railway, 
and there took a train for Manila, 120 miles away. 
In his report covering the fall of 1898, General Otis 

1 Here the author's commanding officer, Major Batson, was shot a 
year and a day later while directing with his usual clear-headed intre- 
pidity the fire of a part of his battalion to protect the crossing of the 
rest of it over the Aringay River, we being at the time in hot pursuit of 
Aguinaldo, whose rear-guard made a stand in the trenches on the other 
side of the river. 



120 American Occupation of Philippines 

always scoldingly says of the Filipinos that in all the 
parleyings of his commissioners with Aguinaldo's 
commissioners before the outbreak, the latter never 
did know what they really wanted. The truth was 
they believed the Americans were going to do with 
them exactly as every other white race they knew of 
had done with every other brown race they knew of, 
but they did not tell General Otis so. Mr. Wilcox, a 
more friendly witness of that same period states their 
position thus at page twenty of the report to Admiral 
Dewey: "They desire the protection of the United 
States at sea, but fear any interference on land." 
"On one point they seemed united, viz., that whatever 
our government may have done for them, it had not 
gained the right to annex them, " adding, in relation to 
the physical preparations to make good this contention, 
in the event of war, "The Philippine Government has 
an organized force in every province we visited." 

The whole tone of the Wilcox-Sargent report and the 
subsequent Wilcox book is an implied reiteration, 
after intimate, extended, and friendly contact with the 
people of all Luzon north of the Pasig River, of Admiral 
Dewey's telegram sent to the Navy Department, June 
23, 1898: "The people are far superior in intelligence 
and capacity for self-government to the people of 
Cuba and I am familiar with both races." In fact 
Messrs. Wilcox and Sargent do not raise the question 
of "capacity for self-government " at all, any more than 
Commodore Perry did when similarly welcomed in 
1854 by the Japanese. 



CHAPTER VII 
The Treaty of Paris 

No man can serve two masters. 

Matthew vi., 24. 

Confine the Empire within those limits which nature seems to have 
fixed as its natural bulwarks and boundaries. 

Augustus Cesar's Will. 

THIS is a tale of three cities, Paris, Washington, and 
Manila. 
Article III. of the Peace Protocol signed at Washing- 
ton, August 12, 1898, provided: 

The United States will occupy and hold the city, bay, and 
harbor of Manila, pending the conclusion of a Treaty of 
Peace which shall determine the control, disposition, and 
government of the Philippines. z 

The "Papers relating to the Treaty with Spain" in- 
cluding the telegraphic correspondence between Presi- 
dent McKinley and our Peace Commissioners pending 
the negotiations, were sent to the Senate, January 30, 

1899, just one week before the final vote on the treaty, 
but the injunction of secrecy was not removed until 
January 31, 1901 — after the presidential election of 

1900. They then were published as Senate Document 
148, 56th Congress, 2d Session. It was not until then 

1 Senate Document 62, pt. 1, 55th Cong., 3d Sess., 1898-9, p. 283. 



122 American Occupation of Philippines 

that the veil was lifted. The instructions to the Peace 
Commissioners were dated September 16, 1898. The 
Commissioners were: William R. Day, of Ohio, 
Republican, just previously Secretary of State, now 
(19 1 2) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the 
United States; Whitelaw Reid, Republican, then editor 
of the New York Tribune, now Ambassador to Great 
Britain, and three members of the United States Senate, 
Cushman K. Davis, of Minnesota, William P. Frye, of 
Maine, Republicans, and George Gray, of Delaware, 
Democrat. Senator Davis died in 1900, and Senator 
Frye in 191 1. Senator Gray has been, since 1899, 
and is now, United States Circuit Judge for the 3d 
Judicial District. Among other things, the Presi- 
dent's instructions to the Commissioners said: 

It is my earnest wish that the United States in making 
peace should follow the same high rule of conduct which guided 
it in facing war. * * * The lustre and the moral strength 
attaching to a cause which can be confidently rested upon 
the considerate judgment of the world should not under any 
illusion of the hour be dimmed by ulterior designs which might 
tempt us * * * into an adventurous departure on untried 
paths. 

By elaborate rhetorical gradations, the instructions 
finally get down to this : 

Incidental to our tenure in the Philippines is the com- 
mercial opportunity. * * * The United States cannot 
accept less than the cession in full right and sovereignty 
of the island of Luzon. 

Though already noticed, we venture, in this connec- 
tion, again to recall that in the month previous (August, 
1898) a gentleman high in the councils of the Admin- 



The Treaty of Paris 123 

istration 1 declared in one of the great reviews of the 
period: "We see with sudden clearness that some of 
the most revered of our political maxims have outlived 
their force." Among these "revered maxims" thus 
suddenly fossilized by his ipse dixit, Mr. Vanderlip 
exuberantly includes the teachings of "Washington's 
Farewell Address and the later crystallization of its 
main thought by President Monroe" — the Monroe 
Doctrine, adding that in lieu of these "A new main- 
spring * * * has become the directing force * * * the 
mainspring of commercialism." 

As permanent chairman of the Philadelphia conven- 
tion which renominated Mr. McKinley for the Presi- 
dency thereafter, in 1900, Senator Lodge,- speaking of 
the issues raised by the Treaty of Paris, said: "We 
make no hypocritical pretence of being interested in 
the Philippines solely on account of others. We believe 
in Trade Expansion." 

"Philanthropy and five per cent, go hand in hand," 
said Mr. Vanderlip's Chief, Secretary of the Treasury 
Lyman J. Gage, about the same time. Such was the 
temper of the times when the treaty was made. 

The first meeting with the Spanish Commissioners 
took place at Paris, October 1st. The opening event 
of the meeting, the initial move of the Spaniards, is 
extremely interesting in the light of subsequent events, 
especially in connection with the Iloilo Fiasco, herein- 
after described (Chapter IX.). 

"Spanish communication represents," says Judge 
Day's cablegram to the President, 2 "that status quo 
has been altered and continues to be altered to the 

1 Hon. Frank A. Vanderlip, then Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, 
now (1912) President of the National City Bank, New York, in the 
Century Magazine, August, 1898. 

2 5. D. 148, p. 15. 



124 American Occupation of Philippines 

prejudice of Spain by Tagalo rebels, whom it describes 
as an auxiliary force to the regular American troops." 

Even diplomacy, in a conciliatory communication 
limited to the obvious, called the Filipinos our allies. 

The Spanish initial move was more immediately 
prompted by the fact that in point of absolute astro- 
nomical time Manila, though captured when it was 
morning of August 13th there, was captured when it was 
evening of August 12th, at Washington, and the protocol 
was signed at Washington in the evening of August 
1 2th. While this point was material, because we had 
captured $900,000 in cash in the Spanish treasury at 
Manila and much other property, the title to which, 
under the laws of war between civilized nations, de- 
pended on just what time it was captured, the matter 
was finally swallowed up and lost sight of in the agree- 
ment to give Spain a lump $20,000,000 for the archi- 
pelago. But the initial move had other aspects. In 
the event we should take the Philippines off her hands, 
Spain was going to insist that we should get back from 
the Filipinos, our "allies," and restore to her all the 
Spaniards they captured after August 12th. She knew 
that in all probability if we bought the Islands we would 
be buying an insurrection, and she was " taking care 
of her own ' ' at our expense. 

The next feature of the proceedings entitled to atten- 
tion in a bird's-eye view like this, concerns the question 
whether we should take only Luzon, or the whole 
archipelago. President McKinley cabled Admiral 
Dewey on August 13th, the day after the protocol was 
signed, asking as to "the desirability of the several 
islands," "coal and other mineral deposits," and "in a 
naval and commercial sense which (of the several 
islands) would be most advantageous." 1 Admiral 

1 Navy Department Report for 1898, Appendix, p. 122. 



The Treaty of Paris 125 

Dewey had replied, of course, that Luzon was "the 
most desirable," but volunteered no advice. He did 
state, "No coal of good quality can be procured in the 
Philippine Islands," which is still true. Allusion is 
made to this telegram in the proceedings, but no copy 
of it is there set forth. On October 4th, our Commis- 
sioners wired President McKinley suggesting that he 
cable out to the Admiral and ask him "whether it 
would be better * * * to retain Luzon * * * or the 
whole group." Mr. McKinley answered that he had 
asked Admiral Dewey before General Merritt left 
Manila to give the latter his views in writing "on 
general question of Philippines," and that "his report 
is in your hands in response to both questions. " But 
the commission replied that Admiral Dewey had sent 
only a copy of a report of General Francis V. Greene's 
and nothing else. There is no record of any further 
advice or opinion from Admiral Dewey on the point 
except that in General Otis's Report (p. 67) we get 
glimpses of a telegram that has never yet, apparently, 
been published, sent by Dewey to Washington early 
in December, 1898, suggesting that we "interfere as 
little as possible in the internal affairs of the Islands." 
No ; Admiral Dewey must be acquitted of having ever 
counselled the McKinley Administration to buy the 
Philippines. 

On October 7th the Commission telegraphed Washing- 
ton that General Merritt attaches much weight to the 
opinion of the Belgian Consul at Manila, M. Andre, 
and that "Consul says United States must take all or 
nothing"; that "if southern islands remained with 
Spain they would be in constant revolt, and United 
States would have a second Cuba"; that "Spanish 
government would not improve," and "would still 
protect monks in their extortion. " 



126 American Occupation of Philippines 

To this advice there was absolutely no answer. 
It wai a case of "all or nothing," and it had already 
become a case of "all" when on September 16th pre- 
vious Mr. McKinley signed his original instructions 
to the Commission stating "The United States cannot 
accept less than Luzon." 

The Commission's telegram of October 7th goes on to 
quote from the Belgian Consul's opinion that "Present 
rebellion represents only one half of one per cent, of 
the inhabitants. " The Consul was not before them 
in person. They were quoting from a memorandum 
submitted by him to General Merritt at Merritt's re- 
quest, made at Manila and dated August 29th, the day 
General Merritt sailed away from Manila bound for 
Paris via the Suez Canal. He had brought the memo- 
randum along with him. From the previous chapters 
the reader will, of course, understand that Americans 
and Europeans at Manila in August, 1898, were paying 
very little attention to Aguinaldo and his claims as 
to the extent of his authority in the provinces. It is 
therefore not surprising that M. Andre's memorandum of 
August 29th should have made the foolish statement, 
"Present rebellion represents only one half of one per 
cent, of inhabitants." But it is eternally regrettable 
that his statement on this point had any weight with 
the Commissioners, for it was, or by that time at least 
(October 7th) had become, just about 99H per cent, 
wide of the mark. As a matter of fact, by October 
7th it would have been more accurate to have said, in 
lieu of the above, "Present rebellion represents prac- 
tically whole people." You see, we started an insur- 
rection in May, in October it had become a full grown 
affair, and in December we bought it. The telegram of 
October 7th also quoted General Merritt as saying, 
"Insurgents would be victorious unless Spaniards did 



The Treaty of Paris 127 

better in future than in past, " and as considering it 
" feasible for United States to take Luzon and perhaps 
some adjacent islands and hold them as England does 
her colonies." These are about the only two sound 
suggestions General Merritt made to that Commission. 
In the next breath they quote him as saying, "Natives 
could not resist 5000 troops." The fact that they did 
resist more than 120,000 troops, that it took more than 
that, all told, to put down the insurrection, is sufficient 
to show how much General Merritt's advice was worth. 
He was right on two points, as indicated. Both Spanish 
fleets had been destroyed and Spain had but one left 
to protect her home coast cities. The death knell of 
her once proud colonial empire had sounded. Decrepit 
as she was, she could not possibly have sent any re- 
inforcements to the Philippines. Besides the Filipinos 
would have "eaten them up." General Merritt's sug- 
gestion to "hold them as England does her colonies" 
was also sensible. In fact that was the only thoroughly 
honest thing to have done, if we were going to take them 
at all. England never acts the hypocrite with her 
colonies. She makes them behave. She does not let 
native people preach sedition in native newspapers, 
because of "sentimental bosh" about freedom of the 
press, until the whole country becomes a smouldering 
hot-bed of sedition. She has blown offending natives 
from the cannon's mouth, when deemed necessary to 
cure them and their country of the desire for indepen- 
dence. If we are going to have colonies at all, we 
ought to govern them with the upright downright 
ruthless honesty of the British. It is more merciful 
in the long run. But we ought not to have colonies at 
all. For if there is one thing this republic stands for, 
above all other things, it is the righteousness of aver- 
sion to a foreign yoke. 



128 American Occupation of Philippines 

In their telegram of October 7th, * the Peace Com- 
missioners, now squarely confronted with the question 
of forcible annexation, begin to let the Administration 
down easy. They say: 

General Anderson in correspondence with Aguinaldo 
in June and July seemed to treat him and his forces as 
allies and native authorities, but subsequently changed his 
tone. Merritt and Dewey both kept clear of any com- 
promising communications. 

A despatch sent by Judge Day certainly comes from 
high authority. The word "compromising" is there- 
fore important. To say that Admiral Dewey did not 
treat Aguinaldo as an ally is to raise a mere technical 
point. But Aguinaldo never did get anything from him 
in writing. What he got consisted more of deeds than 
words. And actions speak louder than words. We 
had an alliance with Aguinaldo, a most " compromis- 
ing' ' alliance and afterwards repudiated it. Admiral 
Dewey made it and General Merritt repudiated it. 
Dewey did, without the President's knowledge, exactly 
what the President and the American people would 
have had him do at the time. And Merritt did exactly 
what the President ordered him to do. But between 
the making of the alliance, and the repudiation of it, 
the President and the American people changed their 
minds. I say the American people, because they 
afterwards ratified all that Mr. McKinley did. You 
see the bitterness that lies away down in the secret 
recesses of the hearts of the Filipino people to-day has 
its source at this point. They had ",£ gentleman's 
agreement," as it were, with us, not in writing, made 
at a time when the thought of a colony had never entered 
our minds. They fought in a common cause with us 

1 Senate Document 148, p. 19. 



The Treaty of Paris 129 

on the faith of that agreement — drove the Spaniards 
into Manila in numerous victorious engagements 
involving much loss of life, on their part, keeping the 
Dons thereafter bottled up in Manila on the land side 
while their "ally" Admiral Dewey was doing the same 
on the sea side. The said Dons were living on horses 
and rats, and famine was imminent when our troops 
arrived and began to finish the work of taking the 
beleaguered city. And then, having changed our 
minds and decided to annex the islands, we repudiated 
our ''gentleman's agreement," on the idea that the 
end justified the means. And the end, as it has turned 
out, did not even justify the means, seeing that the 
islands have proved a heavy financial liability instead 
of a profitable asset. Judge Day's telegram to Secretary 
Hay of October 12th (p. 27) contains this curious and 
surprising passage as to Cuba: 

Senator Gray in favor of accepting sovereignty uncon- 
ditionally * * * that we may thereby avoid future com- 
plications with Cubans, claiming sovereignty while we are 
in process of pacifying island * * * We desire instructions 
on this point. 

The future of Cuba, however, trembled in the balance 
but for a moment. Before "the shell-burred cables" 
had had time to quit vibrating with the question thus 
propounded, there came back this splendidly clean-cut 
answer from the President: 

We must carry out the spirit and letter of the resolution 
of Congress [declaring war]. 

In characterizing Judge Gray's position, above indi- 
cated, as "surprising," no reflection upon him is in- 
tended. On the contrary, such a position, assumed by a 



130 American Occupation of Philippines 

man of such conceded intellectual probity, is illuminat- 
ing as to the attitude subsequently taken concerning the 
Philippines by the Democratic Senators who voted for 
the treaty. This attitude is stated by Senator Lodge, in 
his History of the War with Spain, with all the incisive 
forcefulness to which the country has so long been 
accustomed in the public utterances of that distin- 
guished man, and, seeing that no promise had been 
made, as in the case of Cuba, Senator Lodge's state- 
ment of the position of those who voted for the treaty 
should forever set at rest the stale injustice, still occa- 
sionally repeated, that Mr. Bryan, "played politics" 
in 1898-9 in urging his friends in the Senate to vote for 
its ratification. Says Senator Lodge {History of the 
War with Spain, p. 231): 

The friends of ratification took the very simple ground 
that the treaty committed the United States to no policy, 
but left them free to do exactly as seemed best with all the 
islands ; that the American people could be safely entrusted 
with this grave responsibility, and that patriotism and 
common sense alike demanded the end of the war and the 
re-establishment of peace, which could only be effected by 
the adoption of the treaty. 

October 14th, Washington wires the commission that 
Admiral Dewey has just cabled: 

It is important that the disposition of the Philippine 
Islands should be decided as soon as possible. * * * 
General anarchy prevails without the limits of the city and 
bay of Manila. Natives appear unable to govern. 

In this cablegram the Admiral most unfortunately 
repeated as true some wild rumors then currently 
accepted by the Europeans and Americans at Manila 
which of course were impossible of verification. I say 



The Treaty of Paris 131 

"unfortunately" with some earnestness, because it 
does not appear on the face of his message that they 
were mere rumors. And, that they were wholly erro- 
neous, in point of fact, has already been cleared up in 
previous chapters, wherein the real state of peace, 
order and tranquillity which prevailed throughout 
Luzon at that time has been, it is believed, put beyond 
all doubt. But what manna in the wilderness to the 
McKinley Administration, now that it was bent on 
taking the islands, was that Dewey message of October 
14th, "The natives appear unable to govern"! 

On October 17th, Mr. Day wires Mr. Hay that the 
Peace Commissioners feel the importance of preserving, 
so far as possible, the condition of things existing at 
the time of signing the protocol, to prevent any change 
in the status quo. He says : 

Might not our government * * * take more active and 
positive measures than heretofore for preservation of 
order and protection of life and property in Philippine 
Islands? 

How could we, when Aguinaldo and his people were 
in the saddle all over Luzon, had taken the status quo 
between their teeth and run away with it, and were 
prepared to fight if bidden to halt and dismount ; and, 
which is more, were preserving order perfectly them- 
selves? 

On October 19th, Mr. Hay repeated by wire to Mr. 
Day a cablegram from General Otis which said: "Do 
not anticipate trouble with insurgents * * * Affairs 
progressing favorably. " 

General Otis was making a desperate effort to humor 
Mr. McKinley's " consent-of-the-governed " theory and 
programme. But it was a situation, not a theory, 
which confronted him. 



132 American Occupation of Philippines 

The date of the high-water mark of the Paris peace 
negotiations is October 25th. On that day, Mr. Day 
wired Mr. Hay: 

Differences of opinion among commissioners concern- 
ing Philippine Islands are set forth in statements trans- 
mitted (by cable also) herewith. On these we request 
early consideration and explicit instructions. Liable now 
to be confronted with this question in joint commission 
almost immediately. 

Messrs. Davis, Frye, and Reid, sent a joint signed 
statement. They urged taking over the whole archi- 
pelago, saying that, as their instructions provided for 
the retention at least of Luzon, "we do not consider the 
question of remaining in the Philippine Islands as at all 
now properly before us." They also urged that as 
Spain governed and defended the islands from Manila, 
we became, with the destruction of her fleet and the 
surrender of her army, "as complete masters of the 
whole group as she had been, with nothing needed to 
complete the conquest save to proceed with the ample 
forces we had at hand to take unopposed possession." 
The vice of this proposition, from the strategic as well 
as the ethical point of view, is of course clear enough 
now. 

Spain's government was already tottering in the 
Philippines when the Spanish- American w^ar broke out. 
To be "as complete masters as she had been ' ' was like 
becoming the recipient of a quit-claim deed. Also, 
ours was not a case of taking "unopposed possession." 
An adverse claimant, relying on immemorial prescrip- 
tion, was in full possession; all the tenants on the land 
had attorned to him, and he and they were ready to 
defend their claim against all comers with their lives. 
They reminded one of the recurrent small farmer whom 



The Treaty of Paris 133 

some great timber or other corporation seeks to oust, 
patrolling his land lines rifle in hand, on the lookout 
for the corporation's agent and the sheriff with the 
dispossessory warrant. 

Messrs. Davis, Frye, and Reid go on to say: 

Military and naval witnesses agree that it would be 
practically as easy to hold and defend the whole as a part. 

Hardly any one can fail to read with interest the 
following accurate and vivid picture which they give 
of the physical strategic unity of the Philippine Islands : 

There is hardly a single island in the group from which 
you cannot shoot across to one or more of the others — 
scarcely another archipelago in the world in which the 
islands are crowded so closely together and so inter- 
dependent. 

This explains also why the Filipino people are a 
people. Whenever the American people understand 
that, they will give them their independence, unless 
they get an idea that government of their people by 
their people for their people would be distasteful to 
them. 

In the memorandum of their views telegraphed to 
Washington on October 25th, Messrs. Davis, Frye, 
and Reid also say: 

Public opinion in Europe, including that of Rome, ex- 
pects us to retain whole of Philippine Islands. 

Archbishop Chapelle was in Paris at the time of these 
negotiations. He afterwards told the writer in Manila 
that he got that $20,000,000 put in the Treaty of Paris. 
The Church preferred that our title should be a title 
by purchase rather than a title by conquest, and Mr. 



134 American Occupation of Philippines 

McKinley was vigorously urging the latter. Between 
the legal effects of the two, there is a world of differ- 
ence. The Church outgeneralled the President — check- 
mated him with a bishop. Look at that part of the 
treaty which affects church property : 

Article VIII. The * * * cession * * * cannot in any 
respect impair the property or rights * * * of * * * 
ecclesiastical * * * bodies. 

The Church of Rome, or at least some of the ecclesias- 
tical bodies pertaining to it in the Philippines, owned 
the cream of the agricultural estates. By the treaty 
they have not lost a dollar. It might have been other- 
wise, had not Mr. McKinley's original claim of title 
by conquest been overcome at Paris. 

Judge Day's memorandum of his own views, tele- 
graphed on October 25th along with those of his col- 
leagues, stated that he was unable to agree that we should 
peremptorily demand the entire Philippine group ; that 

In the spirit of our instructions, and bearing in mind the 
often declared disinterestedness of purpose and freedom 
from designs of conquest with which the war was under- 
taken, we should be consistent in demands in making peace 
* * * with due regard to our responsibility because of 
the conduct of our military and naval authorities in dealing 
with the insurgents. 

Again, he says : 

We cannot leave the insurgents either to form a govern- 
ment [he of course did not know what a complete govern- 
ment they had already formed] or to battle against a 
foe which * * * might readily overcome them. 

He also was of course unaware how thoroughly 
anxious the Spaniards then in the Philippines were to 



The Treaty of Paris 135 

get away, and how completely they were at the mercy 
of the new Philippine Republic and its forces. "On 
all hands" says Judge Day, "it is agreed that the in- 
habitants of the islands are unfit for self-government. " 
Of course we knew absolutely nothing worth mention- 
ing about the Filipinos at that time. Judge Day then 
proposes, for the reasons indicated, to accept Luzon 
and some adjacent islands, as being of "strategic ad- 
vantage, " and to leave Spain the rest, with a "treaty 
stipulation for non-alienation without the consent of 
the United States. " It seems to me that Judge Day's 
scheme was the least desirable of all. 

Senator Gray's memorandum of the same date is a 
red-hot argument against taking over any part of the 
archipelago. He begins thus: 

The undersigned cannot agree that it is wise to take 
Philippine Islands in whole or in part. To do so would 
be to reverse accepted continental policy of the country, 
declared and acted upon through our history. * * * It 
will make necessary * * * immense sums for fortifications 
and harbors * * *. Climate and social conditions demoral- 
izing to character of American youth * * *. On whole, 
instead of indemnity, injury * * *. Cannot agree that 
any obligation incurred to insurgents * * *. If we had 
captured Cadiz and Carlists had helped us, would not be 
our duty to stay by them at the conclusion of war * * *. 
No place for * * * government of subject people in 
American system * * *. Even conceding all benefits 
claimed for annexation, we thereby abandon * * * the 
moral grandeur and strength to be gained by keeping our 
word to nations of the world * * * for doubtful material 
advantages and shameful stepping down from high moral 
position boastfully assumed. * * * Now that we have 
achieved all and more than our object, let us simply keep 
our word * * *. Above all let us not make a mockery of the 
[President's] instructions, where, after stating that we took 



136 American Occupation of Philippines 

up arms only in obedience to the dictates of humanity 
* * * and that we had no designs of aggrandizement and 
no ambition for conquest, the President * * * eloquently 
says: "It is my earnest wish that the United States in 
making peace should follow the same high rule of conduct 
which guided it in facing war." 

The next day, October 26th, came this laconic answer: 

The cession must be of the whole archipelago or none. 
The latter is wholly inadmissible and the former must be 
required. 

Probably the one thing about the Paris Peace nego- 
tiations that is sure to interest the average American 
most at this late date is the matter of how we came 
to pay that twenty millions. It vms this way. On 
October 27th, the Commission wired Washington: 

Last night Spanish ambassador called upon Mr. Reid. 

It seems they talked long and earnestly far into the 
night, trying to find a way which w r ould prevent the 
conference from resulting in sudden disruption, and 
consequent resumption of the war. Mr. Reid made 
plain the inflexible determination of the American 
people not to assume the Cuban debt. The Ambassa- 
dor said: "Montero Rios 1 could not return to Madrid 
now if known to have accepted entire Cuban indebted- 
ness, " and asked delay to see "if some concessions 
elsewhere might not be found which would save Span- 
ish Commissioners from utter repudiation at home.". 
There is no doubt that the talk we are now considering 
was a " heart-to-heart" affair, probably quite informal. 
Yet it is one of the most important talks that have 

1 Chairman of the Spanish Commission. 



The Treaty of Paris 137 

occurred between any two men in this world in the last 
fifty years. Mr. Reid finally threw out a hint to the 
effect that as the preponderance of American public 
sentiment seemed rather inclined to retain the Philip- 
pines, "It was possible," he said, "but not probable 
that out of these conditions the Spanish Commissioners 
might find something either in territory or debt 1 which 
might seem to their people at least like a concession.'" 2 
It was the leaven of this hint that leavened the whole 
loaf. There was doubtless much informal parleying 
after that, but finally, the American Commissioners, 
having become satisfied that Spanish honor would not 
be offended by an offer having the substance, if not the 
form, of charity, and being very tired of Spain's spar- 
ring for wind in the hope of a European coalition against 
us should war be resumed, submitted the following 
proposal : 

The Government of the United States is unable to modify 
the proposal heretofore made for the cession of the entire 
archipelago of the Philippine Islands, but the American 
Commissioners are authorized to offer to Spain, in case the 
cession should be agreed to, the sum of #20,000,000. 

This alluring offer was accompanied with the stern 
announcement that 

Upon the acceptance * * * of the proposals herein 
made * * * but not otherwise, it will be possible * * * to 
proceed to the consideration * * * of other matters. 

Also, our Commissioners wired Washington: 

1 Meaning evidently payment of some of Spain's debts with money 
she could probably get from us for the asking, as a matter of sympathy 
for the fellow who is "down and out." 

2 Mr. McKinley had before that sent word significantly that he was 
not unmindful of the distressing financial embarrassments of Spain. 



138 American Occupation of Philippines 

If the Spanish Commissioners refuse our proposition 
* * * nothing remains except to close the negotiations. 

This was very American and very final. Washington 
answered: "Your proposed action approved." 

November 29th, Mr. Day wired Mr. Hay: 

Spanish Commissioners at to-day's conference presented 
a definite and final acceptance of our last proposition. 

And that is how that twenty millions found its way 
into the treaty — not forgetting the prayers and other 
contemporaneous activities of Archbishop Chapelle. 

After the tremendous eight weeks' tension had relaxed, 
and before the final reduction to writing of all the 
details, we see this dear little telegram, from Secretary 
of State Hay, himself a writer of note, come bravely 
paddling into port, where it was cordially received by 
both sides, taken in out of the wet, and put under the 
shelter of the treaty : 

Mr. Hay to Mr. Day : In renewing conventional arrange- 
ments do not lose sight of copyright agreement. 

And here is the last act of the drama : 

Mr. Day to Mr, Hay, Paris, December 10, 1898: Treaty 
signed at 8.50 this evening. 



CHAPTER VIII 
The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation 

Prometheus stole the heavenly fire from the altar of Jupiter to benefit 
mankind, and Jupiter thereupon punished both Prometheus and the rest 
of mankind by creating and giving to them the woman Pandora, a sup- 
posed blessing but a real curse. Pandora brought along a box of bless- 
ings, and when she opened it, everything flew out and away but Hope. 

Tales from JEschylus. 

THE ever-memorable Benevolent Assimilation Pro- 
clamation, the Pandora box of Philippine woes, 
was signed December 21, 1898, and its contents were 
let loose in the Philippines on January 1, 1899. 

Let us consider for a moment the total misappre- 
hension of conditions in the islands under which Mr. 
McKinley drafted and signed that famous document — 
a misapprehension due to General Otis's curious blind- 
ness to the great vital fact of the situation, viz., that 
the Filipinos were bent on independence from the 
first, and preparing to fight for it to the last. Take the 
following Otis utterance, for example, concerning a date 
when practically everybody in the Eighth Army Corps, 
and every newspaper correspondent in the Philippines, 
recognized that war would be certain in the event the 
Paris Peace negotiations should result, as common 
rumor then said they would result, in our taking over 
the islands: 

My own confidence at this time in a satisfactory solution 
of the difficulties which confronted us may be gathered 

139 



140 American Occupation of Philippines 

from a despatch sent to Washington on December 7th, 
wherein I stated that conditions were improving, and that 
there were signs of revolutionary disintegration. 1 

There can be no doubt that, at the date of that cjes- 
patch, General Otis had been given to understand that 
under the Treaty of Paris we were going to keep the 
islands if the treaty should be ratified, and also that 
the if might give the Administration trouble, should 
trouble arise with the Filipinos before the if was dis- 
posed of at home. As heretofore intimated, in addition 
to his preference for legal and administrative work to 
the work of his profession, in the Philippines General 
Otis constituted himself from the beginning a political 
henchman. Ample evidence will be introduced later 
on to show beyond all doubt that all through the early 
difficulties, when the American people should have 
been frankly dealt w 7 ith and given the facts, General 
Otis would, in the exercise of his military powders as 
press censor, always say to the war correspondents, "I 
will let nothing go that wall hurt the Administration." 

Let us see what the real facts of the Philippine situa- 
tion w^ere at the date of the Treaty of Paris, December 
10th, or, which is the same thing, when General Otis 
sent his despatch of December 7th. When the Treaty 
of Paris w^as signed, General Otis was in possession 
of Manila and Cavite, with less than 20,000 men 
under his command, and Aguinaldo was in posses- 
sion of practically all the rest of the archipelago, with 
between 35,000 and 40,000 men under his command, 
armed with guns, and the whole Filipino population 
were in sympathy with the army of their country. 
We have already seen the conditions in the various 
provinces at that time and also the inauguration of the 

1 Otis's Report for i8gg, p. 43. 



Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation 141 

native central government. Let us now examine the 
military figures. 

Ten thousand American soldiers were on hand when 
Manila was captured, August 13th, and 5000 more had 
arrived under command of Major-General Elwell S. 
Otis a week or so after the fall of the city. T They had 
13,000 Spanish soldiers to guard. In addition to this, 
by the terms of the capitulation, the city (population 
say 300,000), its inhabitants, its churches and educa- 
tional establishments, and its private property of all 
descriptions had been placed " under the special safe- 
guard of the faith and honor of the American army. " 2 
Some 4500 to 5000 more troops began to swarm out of 
San Francisco bound for Manila in the latter part of 
October, 1898, the last of them reaching Manila Decem- 
ber nth, the day after the Treaty of Paris was signed. 
After that there were no further additions to General 
Otis's command prior to the outbreak of war with the 
Filipinos, February 4, 1899. 2 Of these (approximately) 
20,000 men, only 1500 to 2000 were regulars, having 
the Krag-Jorgensen smokeless gun. The rest were 
State volunteers, armed with the antiquated Spring- 
field rifles, the same the 71st New York and the 
2d Massachusetts had been permitted to carry into 
the Santiago campaign the summer before. Aguinal- 
do's people were equipped entirely with Mausers cap- 
tured from the Spaniards, and other rifles, bought in 
Hong Kong mostly, using smokeless ammunition. 
Major (now Major-General) J. F. Bell, who is, in the 
judgment of many, one of the best all-round soldiers 
in ' the American army to-day, was in charge of the 
11 Division of Military Information'' at Manila both 
before and after the^ taking of the city. General Bell 

1 War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i. pt. 4, p. 3. 

2 lb., pt. 2, p. 75. 



142 American Occupation of Philippines 

has done many fine things, in the way of reckless 
bravery in battle at the critical moment and of bold 
reconnoitring in campaign, and what he fails to find 
out about an enemy, or a prospective enemy, is not apt 
to be ascertainable. In a report bearing date August 
29, 1898, T prepared in anticipation of possible trouble 
with the Filipinos, he estimated the number of men 
under arms that Aguinaldo had at between 35,000 and 
40,000. This estimate is based by General Bell in 
his report on the number of guns out in the hands of 
the Filipinos, which he figures thus: 

Captured from Spanish militia 12,500 

From Cavite arsenal 2,500 

From Jackson & Evans (American merchants 

trading with Hong Kong) 2,000 

From Spanish (captured in battle) 8,000 

In hands of Filipinos previous to May 1, 1898 15,000 

Total 40,000 

From this number General Bell deducts several thou- 
sands as having been recaptured by the Spaniards, or 
bought in. I at once hear some former comrade-in- 
arms of the Philippine insurrection say: "Oh, no. 
They could n't have had as many as 40,000 guns, or 
near that." I thought the same thing when I first 
read General Bell's report on the matter. But he 
removes the doubt thus: "They are being continually 
sent away to other provinces." 

We did not understand Aguinaldo's movements then. 
All his troops were not around Manila. From what I 
learned from General Lawton and his staff in 1899, my 
belief is that Aguinaldo had perhaps 30,000 men with 
guns around Manila, and out along the railroad, at 

1 Senate Document 62, p. 379. 



Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation 143 

the time of the outbreak of February 4th. It is idle, of 
course, at this late date, to claim that the Filipinos were 
not bent on independence from the first. The matured 
plans of their leaders, formulated at Hong Kong May 4, 
1898, before they ever started the insurrection, pre- 
served in the captured minutes of the meeting already 
noticed, * provide the programme to be adopted in the 
event we should be tempted to keep the islands. In 
that event, they were prepared against surprise, or any 
necessity for making new plans, and were agreed to 
accept war as inevitable. From the first, they made 
ready for it. 

Governmentally and strategically, the Philippine 
Islands, except Mohammedan Mindanao, which is a 
separate and distinct problem, may be described very 
simply and sufficiently as consisting of the great island 
of Luzon, on which Manila is situated, and the Visayan 
group. 2 We are already familiar with the conditions 
in Luzon in December, 1898. You hear a great deal 
about the Philippine archipelago consisting of a 
thousand and one islands, but there are only eight that 
are, broadly speaking, worth considering here. The 
moment a jagged submarine ledge peeps out of the 
water it becomes an island. And even before that it 
may wreck a ship. But we are talking about islands 
that need to be charted on the sea of world politics. 
The Visayan Islands that really count at all in a great 
problem such as that we are now considering, are but 
six in number: Panay, capital Iloilo; Cebu, capital 
Cebu; Bohol, Negros, Samar, and Leyte. 3 Iloilo is 

1 Published at page 7 of Senate Document 208 ', pt. 2, 56th Congress, 
1st Session (1900). 

2 Called in Spanish "Visayas, " or Bisayas. Visayas is an adjective 
derived from the name of the Bay of Biscay, "b" and "v" being inter- 
changeable in Spanish. 

3 For a fuller description of the archipelago, see Chapter XII. 



144 American Occupation of Philippines 

some three hundred and odd miles south of Manila, 
and, besides being the capital of Panay, is the chief 
port of the Visayas and the second city of the archi- 
pelago, Cebu being the third. Under the Spaniards, as 
now under us, a vessel might clear from either of these 
places for any part of the world. As we saw in the chap- 
ter preceding this, as early as November 18th, Admiral 
Dewey had cabled Washington that the entire island of 
Panay was in possession of insurgents, except Iloilo. 
By the end of December, all the Spanish garrisons in the 
Visayan Islands had surrendered to the insurgents. 
{Otis' s Report, p. 61.) Iloilo did not surrender to the 
insurgents until the day before Christmas. But let us 
not anticipate. 

December 13th, General Otis received a petition for 
protection signed by the business men and firms of 
Iloilo (p. 54), sent of course with the approval of the 
general commanding the imperilled Spanish garrison. 
December 14th, he wired Washington for instructions as 
to what action he should take on this petition, saying, 
among other things, "Spanish authorities are still 
holding out, but will receive American troops"; and 
adding one of his inevitable notes of optimism as to 
the tameness of Filipino aspirations (at Iloilo) for 
independence: " Insurgents reported favorable to 
American annexation." 

General Otis knew the Spanish troops were hard 
pressed by the insurgents down at Iloilo, and eagerly 
awaited a reply. President McKinley was then away 
from Washington, on a southern trip, to Atlanta and 
Macon, Georgia, and other points, and nobody at home 
was giving any thought to the Filipinos, while they were 
knocking successively at the gates of the various 
Visayan capitals, and receiving the surrender of their 
Spanish defenders. It was getting toward the yule- 



Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation 145 

tide season. President McKinley was engaged, quite 
seasonably, in putting the finishing touches to the great 
work of his life, which was welding the North and the 
South together forever by wise and kindly manipulation 
of the countless opportunities to do so presented by 
the latest war. It was a season of general peace and 
rejoicing in a thrice-blessed land, and nobody in the 
United States was looking for trouble with the Filipinos. 
With our people it was a case of ignorance being bliss, 
so far as the Philippine Islands and their inhabitants 
were concerned. In his Autobiography of Seventy 
Years, Senator Hoar tells of an interview with President 
McKinley concerning his (the Senator's) attitude toward 
the Treaty of Paris, early in December, 1898. r "He 
greeted me with the delightful and affectionate cordial- 
ity which I always found in him. He took me by the 
hand, and said: 'How are you feeling this winter, Mr. 
Senator?' I was determined there should be no mis- 
understanding. I replied at once: l Pretty pugnacious, 
I confess, Mr. President.' The tears came into his 
eyes and he said, grasping my hand again: 'I shall 
always love you whatever you do. ' " 

It behooves this nation, and all nations, to consider 
those tears. They explain all the subsequent history 
of the Philippines to date. Mr. McKinley had proved 
himself a gallant soldier in his youth, and he knew 
something of the horrors of war. He was also one of 
the most amiable gentlemen that ever lived. But 
it is no disrespect to his memory to say that while Mr. 
McKinley was a good man, Senator Hoar was his 
superior in moral fibre, and he knew it, and he knew the 
country knew it. He knew that Senator Hoar was 
going to fight the ratification of the treaty to the last 
ditch, speaking for the Rights of Man and such old 

1 Vol. ii., p. 315. 



10 



146 American Occupation of Philippines 

"worn out formulas, " and that his only defence before 
the bar of history would have to rest on " Trade 
Expansion," alias the " Almighty Dollar." Those 
tears were harbingers of the coming strife in the Philip- 
pines. They were shed for such lives as that strife 
might cost. They were an assumption of responsibility 
for such shedding of blood as the treaty might entail. 
The President returned to Washington from his southern 
trip on December 21st, and on December 23d (p. 55) 
cabled General Otis the following reply to his request 
of December 14th for instructions: 

Send necessary troops to Iloilo, to preserve the peace 
and protect life and property. It is most important that 
there should be no conflict with the insurgents. Be concilia- 
tory but firm. 

Senator Hoar had put Mr. McKinley on notice that 
he was going to present the ethics of the case in the 
debate on the treaty. Congress had gone home for 
the holidays, and after it re-assembled in January the 
treaty would come up. The vote was sure to be close, 
and a too vigorous manifestation of belief on the part 
of the Filipinos that this nation was not closing the 
war with Spain animated by "the same high rule of 
conduct which guided it in facing war" (Mr. McKin- 
ley* s instructions to the Peace Commissioners) might 
defeat the ratification of the treaty. Indeed, the final 
vote of February 6th, was so close that the Adminis- 
tration had but one vote to spare. The final vote was 
fifty-seven to twenty-seven — just one over the neces- 
sary two-thirds. The smoke of a battle to subjugate 
the Filipinos might "dim the lustre and the moral 
strength," as Mr. McKinley had expressed it in his in- 
structions to the Peace Commissioners, of a war to free 
the Cubans. Therefore there must be no trouble, at 



Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation 147 

least until after the ratification of the treaty. Presi- 
dent McKinley had invented in the case of Cuba a 
very catchy phrase, "Forcible annexation would be 
criminal aggression," and every time anybody now 
quoted it on him it tended to take the wind out of 
his sails. So benevolently eager was that truly kind- 
hearted and Christian gentleman to avoid the ap- 
pearance of " criminal aggression" that he evidently 
got to thinking about that telegram of December 
23d in which he had authorized General Otis to send 
troops to the relief of the beleaguered Spanish gar- 
rison at Iloilo, and also about the message from Ad- 
miral Dewey received November 18th previous, to the 
effect that the entire island of Panay except Iloilo 
was then already in the hands of the insurgents. The 
result was that he decided not to let his conciliatory 
proclamation of December 21st await the slow process 
of the mails, and therefore, though it consisted of some- 
thing like one thousand words, he had it cabled out to 
General Otis in full on December 27th. It is now here 
reproduced in full because it precipitated the war in 
the Philippines, and is the key to all our subsequent 
dealings with them 1 : 

THE BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION PROCLAMATION 

Executive Mansion, Washington, 
December 21, 1898. 

The destruction of the Spanish fleet in the harbor of 
Manila by the United States naval squadron commanded 
by Rear-Admiral Dewey, followed by the reduction of the 
city and the surrender of the Spanish forces, practically 
effected the conquest of the Philippine Islands and the 

1 This proclamation has been printed many times, in various govern- 
ment publications, e.g., War Department Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, 
PP- 355~6; Senate Document 208, 56th Congress, 1st Session (1900) 
pp. 82-3, etc. 



I 



148 American Occupation of Philippines 

suspension of Spanish sovereignty therein. With the 
signature of the treaty of peace between the United States 
and Spain by their respective plenipotentiaries at Paris 
on the 10th instant, and as a result of the victories of 
American arms, the future control, disposition, and govern- 
ment of the Philippine Islands are ceded to the United States. 
In the fulfilment of the rights of sovereignty thus acquired 
and the responsible obligations of government thus assumed, 
the actual occupation and administration of the entire 
group of the Philippine Islands becomes immediately 
necessary, and the military government heretofore main- 
tained by the United States in the city, harbor, and bay 
of Manila is to be extended with all possible despatch to the 
whole of the ceded territory. In performing this duty the 
military commander of the United States is enjoined to 
make known to the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands 
that in succeeding to the sovereignty of Spain, in severing 
the former political relations, and in establishing a new 
political power, the authority of the United States is to 
be exerted for the securing of the persons and property of 
the people of the islands and for the confirmation of all 
their private rights and relations. It will be the duty of 
the commander of the forces of occupation to announce 
and proclaim in the most public manner that we come not 
as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the 
natives in their homes, in their employments, and in their 
personal and religious rights. All persons who, either by 
active aid or by honest submission, co-operate with the 
Government of the United States to give effect to these 
beneficent purposes will receive the reward of its support 
and protection. All others will be brought within the law- 
ful rule we have assumed, with firmness if need be, but 
without severity, so far as possible. Within the absolute 
domain of military authority, which necessarily is and must 
remain supreme in the ceded territory until the legislation 
of the United States shall otherwise provide, the municipal 
laws of the territory in respect to private rights and property 
and the repression of crime are to be considered as con- 



Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation 149 

tinuing in force, and to be administered by the ordinary 
tribunals, so far as practicable. The operations of civil 
and municipal government are to be performed by such 
officers as may accept the supremacy of the United States by 
taking the oath of allegiance, or b}^ officers chosen, as far as 
practicable, from the inhabitants of the islands. While 
the control of all the public property and the revenues of 
the state passes with the cession, and while the use and 
management of all public means of transportation are 
necessarily reserved to the authority of the United States, 
private property, whether belonging to individuals or 
corporations, is to be respected except for cause duly estab- 
lished. The taxes and duties heretofore payable by the 
inhabitants to the late government become payable to 
the authorities of the United States unless it be seen fit 
to substitute for them other reasonable rates or modes of 
contribution to the expenses of government, whether general 
or local. If private property be taken for military use, 
it shall be paid for when possible in cash, at a fair valuation, 
and when payment in cash is not practicable, receipts are 
to be given. All ports and places in the Philippine Islands 
in the actual possession of the land and naval forces of the 
United States will be opened to the commerce of all friendly 
nations. All goods and wares not prohibited for military 
reasons by due announcement of the military authority 
will be admitted upon payment of such duties and other 
charges as shall be in force at the time of their importation. 
Finally, it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim 
of the military administration to win the confidence, 
respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines 
by assuring them in every possible way that full measure 
of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of 
free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of 
the United States is one of 

BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION 

substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbi- 
trary rule. In the fulfilment of this high mission, support- 



150 American Occupation of Philippines 

ing the temperate administration of affairs for the greatest 
good of the governed, there must be sedulously maintained 
the strong arm of authority, to repress disturbance and to 
overcome all obstacles to the bestowal of the blessings of 
good and stable government upon the people of the Philip- 
pine Islands under the free flag of the United States. 

William McKinley. 



The words used in the foregoing proclamation which 
were regarded by the Filipinos as " fighting words,'* 
i. e. t as making certain the long anticipated probability 
of a war for independence, are those which appear 
in italics. The rest of the proclamation counted for 
nothing with them. They had been used to the hol- 
low rhetoric and flowery promises of equally eloquent 
Spanish proclamations all their lives, they and their 
fathers before them. 

In suing to President McKinley for peace on July 
22d, previous, the Prime Minister of Spain had justified 
all the atrocities committed and permitted by his 
government in Cuba during the thirty years' struggle 
for independence there which preceded the Spanish- 
American War by saying that what Spain had done 
had been prompted only by a ' ' desire to spare the great 
island from the dangers of premature independence." 1 

Clearly, from the Filipino point of view, the United 
States was now determined "to spare them from the 
dangers of premature independence," using such force 
as might be necessary for the accomplishment of that 
pious purpose. 

The truth is that, Prometheus-like, we stole the sacred 
fire from the altar of Freedom whereupon the flames 
of the Spanish War were kindled, and gave it to the 
Filipinos, justifying the means by the end; and "the 

1 Senate Document 62, pt. 1, 55th Congress, 3d Session, p. 272. 



Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation 151 

links of the lame Lemnian" have been festering in our 
flesh ever since. The Benevolent Assimilation Proc- 
lamation was a kind of Pandora Box, supposed to 
contain all the blessings of Liberty, but when the lid 
was taken off, woes innumerable befell the intended 
beneficiaries, and left them only the Hope of Freedom — 
from us. Verily there is nothing new under the sun. 
It is written: "Thou shalt not steal" anything — 
not even "sacred fire." There is no such thing as 
nimble morality. The lesson of the old Greek poet 
fits our case. So also, indeed, do those of the modern 
sage, Maeterlinck, for the Filipinos could have found 
their own Bluebird for happiness. The record of our 
experience in the Philippines is full of reminders, which 
will multiply as the years go by, that, after all, every 
people have an "unalienable right" to pursue happi- 
ness in their own way as opposed to somebody else's 
way. That is the law of God, as God gives me to see 
the right. Conceived during the Christmas holiday 
season and in the spirit of that blessed season and 
presented to the Filipino people on New Year's Day, 
received by them practically as a declaration of war 
and baptized in the blood of thousands of them in the 
battle of February 4th thereafter, the manner of the 
reception of this famous document, the initial reversal 
and subsequent evolution of its policies, and all the 
lights and shadows of Benevolent Assimilation will be 
traced in the chapters which follow. 



CHAPTER IX 
The Iloilo Fiasco 

The King of France with forty thousand men 
Marched up the hill and then marched down again. 

Old English Ballad. 

WE have already seen how busily Aguinaldo occu- 
pied himself during the protracted peace 
negotiations at Paris in getting his government and 
people ready for the struggle for independence which 
he early and shrewdly guessed would be ultimately 
forthcoming. General Otis was in no position to pre- 
serve the status quo. The status quo was a worm in hot 
ashes that would not stay still. The revolution was a 
snow-ball that would roll. The day after Christmas, 
General Otis at last sent an expedition under General 
Marcus P. Miller to the relief of Iloilo, but when it 
arrived, December 28th, the Spaniards had already 
turned the town over to the insurgent authorities, and 
sailed away. When General Miller arrived, being under 
imperative orders from Washington to be conciliatory, 
and under no circumstances to have a clash with the 
insurgents, the Administration's most earnest solicitude 
being to avoid a clash, at least until the treaty of peace 
with Spain should be ratified by the United States 
Senate, he courteously asked permission to land, several 
times, being refused each time. With a request of 
this sort sent ashore January 1, 1899, he transmitted 



The Iloilo Fiasco 153 

a copy of the proclamation set forth in the preceding 
chapter. The insurgent reply defiantly forbade him 
to land. Therefore he did not land — because Washing- 
ton was pulling the strings — until after the treaty was 
ratified. "So here we are at Iloilo, an exploded bluff, " 
wrote war correspondent J. F. Bass to his paper, Har- 
per's Weekly. 

By the time the treaty was ratified the battle of 
Manila of February 4th had occurred, and the pusil- 
lanimity of self -doubting diplomacy had given way to 
the red honesty of war. x 

As was noticed in the chapter preceding this, by 
the end of December, 1898, all military stations out- 
side Luzon, with the exception of Zamboanga, in 
the extreme south of the great Mohammedan island 
of Mindanao near Borneo, had been turned over 
by the Spaniards to the insurgents. When General 
Miller, commanding the expedition to Iloilo, arrived 
in the harbor of that city with his teeming troop-ships 
and naval escorts on December 28th, an aide of the 
Filipino commanding general came aboard the boat 
he was on and "desired to know, " says General Miller's 
report, 2 "if we had anything against them — were we 
going to interfere with them. ' ' General Miller then sent 
some of his own aides ashore with a letter to the insur- 
gent authorities, explaining the peaceful nature of his 
errand. They at once asked if our people had brought 
down any instructions from Aguinaldo. Answering 
in the negative, General Miller's aides handed them his 
olive-branch letter. They read it and said they could 
do nothing without orders from Aguinaldo "in cases 

1 The " self -doubting " lay in the doubt of the Administration as to 
whether its programme of conquest would or would not be ratified by the 
Senate. The "pusillanimity" lay, wholly unbeknown to Washington 
of course, in the estimate of us it produced among the Filipinos. 

3 War Department Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 62. 



154 American Occupation of Philippines 

affecting their Federal Government. " The grim veteran 
commanding the American troops smoked on this for 
a day or so, and then asked a delegation of insurgents 
that were visiting his ship by his invitation — they 
would not let him land, you see — whether if he landed 
they would meet him with armed resistance. The 
Malay reverence for the relation of host and guest 
resulted in an evasive reply. They could not answer. 
But after they went back to the city they did answer. 
And this is what they wrote: 

Upon the return of your commissioners last night, we 

* * * discussed the situation and attitude of this region 
of Bisayas in regard to its relations and dependence upon 
the central government of Luzon (the Aguinaldo govern- 
ment, of course) ; and * * * I have the honor to notify you 
that, in conjunction with the people, the army, and the 
committee, we insist upon our pretension not to consent 

* * * to any foreign interference without express orders 
from the central government of Luzon * * * with which we 
are one in ideas, as we have been until now in sacrifices. * * * 
If you insist * * * upon disembarking your forces, this is 
our final attitude. May God forgive you, etc. 11 

Iloilo, December 30, 1898. z 

This letter is recited in General Miller's report to be 
from "President Lopez, of the Federal Government of 
Visayas. " General Miller then wrote Otis begging 
permission to attack on the ground that upon the suc- 
cess of the expedition he was in charge of "depends 
the future speedy yielding of insurrectionary move- 
ments in the islands." War correspondent Bass, who 
was on the ground at the time, also wrote his paper: 
"The effect on the natives will be incalculable all over 
the islands." But General Otis was trying to help 

1 War Department Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 64. 



The Iloilo Fiasco 155 

Mr. McKinley nurse the treaty through the Senate on 
the idea that there weren't going to be any "insur- 
rectionary movements in the islands, " that all dark and 
misguided conspiracies of selfishly ambitious leaders 
looking to such impious ends would fade before the 
sunlight of Benevolent Assimilation. 

Cautioning Otis against any clash at Iloilo, Mr. 
McKinley wired January 9th: " Conflict would be most 
unfortunate, considering the present. * * * Time 
given the insurgents cannot injure us, and must weaken 
and discourage them. They will see our benevolent 
purpose, etc." 1 

The Iloilo fiasco did indeed furnish to the insurgent 
cause aid and comfort at the psychologic moment when 
it most needed encouragement to bring things to a 
head. It presented a spectacle of vacillation and seem- 
ing cowardice which heartened the timid among the 
insurgents and started among them a general eagerness 
for war which had been lacking before. In one of his 
bulletins 2 to Otis, General Miller tells of two boats' 
crews of the 51st Iowa landing on January 5th, and 
being met by a force of armed natives who "asked them 
their business and warned them off, " whereupon they 
heeded the warning and returned to their transport. 
This regiment had then been cooped up on their trans- 
port continuously since leaving San Francisco Novem- 
ber 3d, previous, sixty-three days. They were kept lying 
off Iloilo until January 29th, and then brought back to 
Manila and landed, after eighty-nine days aboard ship, 
all idea of taking Iloilo before the Senate should act 
having been abandoned. 

The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation was re- 
ceived by cable in cipher, at Manila, December 29th, 
and as soon as it had been written out in long hand 

1 War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 79. 2 lb., p. 67. 



156 American Occupation of Philippines 

General Otis hurried a copy down to General Miller 
at Iloilo by a ship sailing that day, so that General 
Miller might ''understand the position and policy of our 
government. " But he forgot to tell Miller to conceal 
the policy for the present. 1 So the latter, on January 
1st, not only sent a copy of it to the " President of the 
Federal Government of Visayas," Mr. Lopez, 2 but in 
the note of transmittal he "asked," says his report, 
"that they permit the entry of my troops." 3 What 
a fatal mistake! Here was a proclamation represent- 
ing all the "majesty, dominion, and power" of the 
American Government, signed by the President of the 
United States, in terms asserting immediate, absolute, 
and supreme authority, and the natives were "asked" 
if they would "permit" its enforcement. General 
Miller's report says that he also had the proclamation 
1 ' translated into Spanish and distributed to the people. ' ' 4 
"The people laugh at it," he says. "The insurgents 
call us cowards and are fortifying at the point of the 
peninsula, and are mounting old smooth-bore guns left 
by the Spaniards. They are intrenching everywhere, 
are bent on having one fight, and are confident of vic- 
tory. The longer we wait before the attack the harder it 
will be to put down the insurrection. " This is especially 
interesting in the light of President McKinley's justi- 
fication of the wisdom of temporizing — on the idea that 
delay would weaken the insurgents and could not hurt 
us. "Let no one convince you" writes Miller to Otis 
on January 5th, "that peaceful means can settle the 
difficulty here. " 

1 "I sent you the President's proclamation, not for publication, but 
for your information," wrote Otis to Miller after the latter had let the 
cat out of the bag. Senate Document 208, p. 58. 

2 Senate Document 208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 54. 

3 War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 66. 4 Ibid. 



The Iloilo Fiasco 157 

The appeal to Otis to permit commencement of 
operations was without avail. Otis was the Manila 
agent of the Aldrich Old Guard in the Senate, in charge 
of the pending treaty. He would simply send the 
disgusted Miller messages not to be hasty, assuring 
him that the firing of a shot at Iloilo would mean the 
precipitation of general conflict about Manila and all 
over the place, and that this would be "most disap- 
pointing to the President of the United States, who 
continually urges extreme caution and no conflict." 1 

The Administration was counting senatorial noses 
at the time, and that its anxiety was justified is apparent 
from the fact already noted, that on the final vote 
whereby the treaty was ratified it had but one vote to 
spare. So General Miller sat sunning himself on the 
deck of his transport, and watching the insurgents work- 
ing like ants at their fortifications, and vainly wishing 
his 2500 men could get ashore at least long enough to 
stretch themselves a bit. John F. Bass, correspondent 
for Harper's Weekly, left Iloilo, returned to Manila, 
and wrote his paper on January 23d: "I returned 
to Manila well knowing that there was nothing more to 
be done in Iloilo until the Senate voted on the Treaty 
of Peace. " 

On the eighth day after General Miller had asked 
permission of the Iloilo village Hampdens to enforce 
the orders of the President of the United States, the 
"Federal Government of the Visayas, " through its 
President, Senor Lopez, finally deigned to notice 
Mr. McKinley's proclamation. It said under date of 
January 9th: 

General: We have the high honor of having received 
your message, dated January ist, of this year, enclosing 
1 War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 59. 



158 American Occupation of Philippines 

letter of President McKinley. You say in one clause of 
your message : "As indicated in the President's cablegram, 
under these conditions the inhabitants of the island of 
Panay ought to obey the political authority of the United 
States, and they will incur a grave responsibility if, after 
deliberating, they decide to resist said authority." So 
the council of state of this region of Visayas are, at this 
present moment, between the authority of the United 
States, that you try to impose on us, and the authority of 
the central government of Malolos. 

Then follows this remarkable statement of the case for 
the Filipinos: 

The supposed authority of the United States began 
with the Treaty of Paris, on the 10th of December, 1898. 
The authority of the Central Government of Malolos is founded 
in the sacred and natural bonds of blood, language, uses, 
customs, ideas, {and) sacrifices. 1 

General Otis was fond of throwing cold water on any 
particularly eloquent Filipino insurrecto document he 
had occasion to put in his reports by saying that Mabini 
was "the brains of" the Malolos Government — mean- 
ing the only brains it had 2 — and that he probably wrote 
such document, whatever it might be. But here is a 
piece of real eloquence, originating away down in the 
Visayan Islands, as far away from Malolos as Colonel 
Stark and his "Green Mountain Boys" w r ere from 
Washington and Hamilton in 1776 and after. What 
then is the explanation of composition so forceful in its 

x Senate Document 208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess. (1900), pp. 54-5. 
2 Colonel Enoch H. Crowder, General Otis's Judge Advocate, was 
"the brains of" the Otis government. But the difference between 
General Otis and Aguinaldo was that Aguinaldo always had the good 
sense to follow Mabini's advice, while Otis did not always follow 
Crowder's. 



The Iloilo Fiasco 159 

impassioned simplicity, and in the light of subsequent 
events, so pathetic? There is but one explanation. 
It came from the heart. It was the cry of the Soul of 
Humanity seeking its natural affiliations. It was the 
language of what Aguinaldo's early state papers always 
used to call the "legitimate aspirations of" his people — ■ 
legitimate aspirations which we later strangled. The 
reason of the writer's earnestness is that a few months 
later he helped do some of the strangling. Thirteen 
years afterwards, a thorough acquaintance with the 
Filipino side of the matter, derived from an examination 
of the information which has been gradually accumu- 
lated and published by our government during that 
time, causes him to say, "Father forgive me, for I knew 
not what I did. " The 35,000 volunteers of 1899 knew 
nothing about the Filipinos or their side of the case. 
We were like the deputy sheriff who goes out with a 
warrant duly issued to arrest a man charged with 
unlawful breach of the peace. It is not his business to 
inquire whether the man is guilty or not. If the man 
resists arrest, he takes the consequences. 

On the second day after the above defiance of the 
President of the United States was served up to General 
Miller, that gallant officer having dutifully swallowed 
it, sent an officer ashore on a diplomatic mission. The 
name and rank of this military ambassador were Acting 
Assistant Surgeon Henry DuR. Phelan, who clearly 
appears to have been a man of keen insight and con- 
siderable ability. His written report to General Miller 
of what transpired is a document of permanent inter- 
est and importance to the annals of men's struggles 
for free institutions. 1 It states that at the meeting 
the spokesman of the Filipinos, Attorney Raimundo 
Melliza, began by saying that "all the Americans 

1 Senate Document 208, p. 56. 



i6o American Occupation of Philippines . 

owned was Manila." That was unquestionably true, 
so our ambassador, it seems, did not gainsay it. Dr. 
Phelan suggested that the Americans had sacrificed 
lives and money in destroying the power of Spain. 
The spokesman, Attorney Melliza, replied that "they 
also had made great sacrifice in lives, and that they had 
a right to their country which they had fought for, and 
that we are here now to take from them what they had 
won by fighting; that they had been our allies, and we 
had used them as such.'" Dr. Phelan's report goes on 
to say: "I replied that military occupation was a 
necessity for a time, * * * and that as soon as order 
was assured it would be withdrawn * * *. They 
smiled at this." Well they might. Fourteen years 
have elapsed since then, and the lawmaking power of 
the United States has never yet declared whether the 
American occupation of the Philippine Islands is to be 
temporary, like our occupation of Cuba was, or per- 
manent, like the British occupation of Egypt is. True, 
Dr. Phelan said ''military" occupation, but the smile 
was provoked by the suggestion of temporariness. 
After the committee smiled, they remarked: 

We have fought for independence and feel that we have 
the power of governing and need no assistance. We are 
showing it now. You might inquire of the foreigners if it 
is not so. 

Dr. Phelan's report proceeds: 

They stated that their orders were not to allow us to 
disembark, and that they were powerless to allow us to 
come in without express orders from their government. 

In regard to the Treaty of Paris, the spokesman, Lawyer 
Melliza, said: 



The Iloilo Fiasco 161 

International law forbids a nation to make a contract 
in regard to taking the liberties of its colonies. 

Lawyer Melliza was wrong. If he had said " the law of 
righteousness, ' ' instead of ' ' international law, ' ' his prop- 
osition, thus amended, would have been incontrovertible. 
On September 19, 191 1, one of the great newspapers of 
this country, the Denver Post, sent out to the members of 
the Congress of the United States, and to "The Fourth 
Estate" also, the newspaper editors, a circular letter 
proposing that we sell the Philippine Islands to Japan. 
A member of the United States Senate sent this answer : 

I do not favor your proposition. Selling the Islands 
means selling the inhabitants. The question of traffic 
in human beings, whether by wholesale or retail, was 
forever settled by the Civil War. 

About the same time a leading daily paper of Georgia 
had an editorial on the Denver Post's proposition, the 
most conspicuous feature of which was that Japan was 
too poor to pay us well, should we contemplate selling 
the Filipinos to her, so it was no use to discuss the 
matter at length. 

No; Lawyer Melliza's proposition has no standing 
in international law yet. But it has with what Mr. 
Lincoln's First Inaugural called "the better angels of 
our nature," if we stop to reflect. 

Another interesting feature of the Phelan report to 
General Miller is the following: 

I asked Lawyer Melliza if Aguinaldo said we could 
occupy the city would they agree to it. He replied most 
emphatically that they would. 

At that time, in January, 1899, while the debate on 
the treaty was in progress in the United States Senate, 



162 American Occupation of Philippines 

there was hardly a province in that archipelago where 
you would not have encountered the same inflexible 
adherence to the Aguinaldo government. 
Dr. Phelan's report closes thus: 

At the conclusion of the meeting it was said that as 
this question involved the integrity of the entire republic, it 
could not be further discussed here, but must be referred 
to the Malolos Government. 

There is one other statement made by the spokesman 
of the Filipinos, at their meeting with Dr. Phelan, which 
arrested and gripped my attention. That it may in- 
terest the reader as it did me, it will need but a word 
or so as preface. In the fall of that same year, 1899, 
when my regiment, the 29th Infantry, U. S. Volunteers, 
reached the Islands, it was supposed that the insurrec- 
tion had about played out, i.e., that it had been " beaten 
to a frazzle, " because the Filipinos no longer offered to- 
do battle in force in the open, Yet all that fall, and 
all through 1900 and after, a most obstinate guerrilla 
warfare was kept up. Anywhere in the archipelago 
you were liable to be fired mi from ambush. At first 
we could not understand this. Later we found out it 
was the result of an order of Aguinaldo' s, faithfully 
carried out, not to assemble in large commands, but 
to conduct a systematic guerrilla warfare indefinitely. 
We learned this by capturing a copy of the order, which 
was quite elaborate. Dr. Phelan's report says: 

I told him [Melliza] that the city was in our power, 
and that we could destroy it at any time * * *. Lawyer 
Melliza replied that he cared nothing about the city; that 
we could destroy it if we wished * * *. " We will with- 
draw to the mountains and repeat the North American Indian 
warfare. Yon must not forget that. " 



The Iloilo Fiasco 163 

Later, they did. 

On January 15th, General Otis wrote General 
Miller 1 again cautioning him against any clash 
at Iloilo, and saying of conditions at Manila and 
Malolos: "The revolutionary government is very 
anxious for peaceful relations. " 

Three days later Senator Bacon saw the situation 
with clearer vision from the other side of the world 
than General Otis could see it under his nose, and said 
on the floor of the Senate on January 18th concerning 
the conditions at Manila and Malolos : 

While there is no declaration of war, while there is 
no avowal of hostile intent, with two such armies fronting 
each other with such divers intents and resolves, it will 
take but a spark to ignite the magazines which is to 
explode. 2 

The spark was ignited on February 4, 1899, by a sentinel 
of the Nebraska regiment firing on some Filipino sol- 
diers who disregarded his challenge to halt, and killing 
one of them. War once on, General Miller was directed 
on February 10th, after he had lain in Iloilo harbor for 
forty-four days, to take the city. So at last he gave 
written notice to the insurgents in Iloilo demanding 
the surrender of the city and garrison " before sunset 
Saturday, the nth instant" and requesting them to 
give warning to all non-combatants. 3 Thereupon the 
insurgents set fire to the city and departed. 

1 s. D. 208, p. 58. 

2 See Congressional Record, January 18, 1899, p. 734. 

3 Senate Document 208, p. 59. 



CHAPTER X 
Otis and Aguinaldo {Continued) 

A word spoken in due season, how good is it ! 

Proverbs xv. f 23. 

IN the last chapter we saw the debut of the Benevolent 
Assimilation programme at Iloilo. We are now to 
observe it at Manila. General Otis says in his report 
for 1899 1 : 

After fully considering the President's proclamation and 
the temper of the Tagalos with whom I was daily discussing 
political problems and the friendly intentions of the United 
States Government toward them, I concluded that there 
were certain words and expressions therein, such as 
"sovereignty," " right of cession," and those which directed 
immediate occupation, etc., * * * which might be advan- 
tageously used by the Tagalo war party to incite widespread 
hostilities among the natives. * * * It was my opinion, 
therefore, that I would be justified in so amending the paper 
that the beneficent object of the United States Government 
would be clearly brought within the comprehension of the 
people. 

Accordingly, he published a proclamation as indi- 
cated, on January 4th, at Manila. In a less formal com- 
munication concerning this proclamation, viz., a letter 

1 War Department Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 66. 

164 



Otis and Aguinaldo 165 

to General Miller at Iloilo, General Otis comes to the 
point more quickly thus: 

After some deliberation we put out one of our own which 
it was believed would suit the temper of the people. x 

The only thing in the Otis proclamation specifically 
directed toward soothing "the temper of the people" 
was a hint that the United States would, under the 
government it was going to impose, "appoint the repre- 
sentative men now forming the controlling element of 
the Filipinos to civil positions of responsibility and 
trust" (p. 69). And this, far from soothing Filipino 
temper, was interpreted as an offer of a bribe if they 
would desert the cause of their country. The bona 
fides of the offer they did not doubt for a moment. In 
fact it caught a number of the more timid prominent 
men, especially the elderly ones of the ultraconservative 
element preferring submission to strife. But the 
younger and bolder spirits were faithful, many of them 
unto death, and all of them unto many battles and 
much "hiking." 2 

General Otis's report goes on to tell how, about the 
middle of January, after he had published his sugar- 
coated edition of the presidential proclamation at 
Manila, it then at last occurred to him that General 
Miller might have published the original text of it in 
full at Iloilo, and, "fearing that," says he, "I again des- 
patched Lieut. Col. Potter to Iloilo" — evidently post- 
haste. But it appears that when the breathless Potter 
arrived, the lid was already off. The horse had left 

1 Senate Document 208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., 1900, p. 58, letter to 
General Miller. 

3 A campaign synonym for forced marching. It has no known ety- 
mology, but to the initiated it suggests torrential downpouring of rain 
and bedraggled mud-spattered columns of troops. 



i66 American Occupation of Philippines 

the stable and the door was open, as we saw in the pre- 
ceding chapter. However, as the Otis report indicates 
in this connection (p. 67), copies of the original McKin- 
ley proclamation, as published in full at Iloilo by Gen- 
eral Miller, were of course promptly forwarded by the 
insurgents at Iloilo to the insurgent government at 
Malolos. So all that General Otis got for his pains was 
detection in the attempt to conceal the crucial words 
asserting American sovereignty in plain English. He 
tells us himself that as soon as the Malolos people dis- 
covered the trick, "it [the proclamation] became" — 
in the light of the Otis doctoring — " the object of venom- 
ous attack." His report was of course written long 
after all these matters occurred, but its language shows 
a total failure on the part of its author, even then, to 
understand the cause of the bitterness he denominates 
"venom." This bitterness grew naturally out of what 
seemed to the Filipinos an evident purpose of the 
United States to take and keep the Islands and an 
accompanying unwillingness to acknowledge that pur- 
pose, as shown by the conspicuous discrepancies between 
the original text of the proclamation as published at 
Iloilo by General Miller, on January 1st, and the modi- 
fied version of it given out by General Otis at Manila on 
January 4th. ' ' The ablest of the insurgent newspapers, ' ' 
says he (p. 69), "which was now issued at Malolos and 
edited by the uncompromising Luna * * * attacked 
the policy * * * as declared in the proclamation, and 
its assumption of sovereignty * * * with all the vigor 
of which he was capable." The nature of Editor Luna's 
philippics is not described by General Otis in detail, the 
only specific notion we get of them being from General 
Otis's echo of their tone, which, he tells us, was to the 
effect that "everything tended simply to a change of 
masters." But in another part of the Otis Report (p. 



Otis and Aguinaldo 167 

163) we find an epistle written about that time by one 
partisan of the revolution to another, whose key-note, 
given in the following extracts, was doubtless in har- 
mony with the Luna editorials : 

We shall not have them (Filipinos enough to conduct a 
decent government) in 10, 20, or a 100 years, because the 
Yankees will never acknowledge the aptitude of an "in- 
ferior" race to govern the country. Do not dream that 
when American sovereignty is implanted in the country the 
American office-holders will give up. Never! If * * * 
it depends upon them to say whether the Filipinos have 
sufficient men for the government of the country * * * 
they will never say it." 

Is not the American who pretends that he would 
have done anything but just what the Filipinos did, 
had he been in their place, i.e., fought to the last ditch 
for the independence of his country, the rankest sort 
of a hypocrite? General Otis was a soldier, and his 
views may have been honestly colored by his environ- 
ment. But how at this late date can any fair-minded 
man read the above extracts illustrative of the temper 
in which the Filipinos went to war with us without 
acknowledging the righteousness of the motives which 
impelled them? 

Aguinaldo promptly met General Otis' s proclamation 
of January 4th by a counter-proclamation put out 
the very next day, in which he indignantly protested 
against the United States assuming sovereignty over the 
Islands. "Even the women," says General Otis (p. 
70), "in a document numerously signed by them, gave 
me to understand that after the men were all killed 
off they were prepared to shed their patriotic blood 
for the liberty and independence of their country." 
General Otis actually intended this last as a sly touch 



168 American Occupation of Philippines 

of humor. But when we recollect Mr. Millet's de- 
scription (Chapter IV. ante) of the women coming to 
the trenches and cooking rice for the men while the 
Filipinos were slowly drawing their cordon ever closer 
about the doomed Spanish garrison of Manila in July 
and August previous, fighting their way over the ground 
between them and the besieged main body of their an- 
cient enemies inch by inch, while Admiral Dewey block- 
aded them by sea, General Otis' s sly touch of humor loses 
some of its slyness. ' ' The insurgent army also, ' ' he says 
(p. 70), "was especially affected * * * and only awaited 
an opportunity to demonstrate its invincibility in war 
with the United States troops * * * whom it had 
commenced to insult and charge with cowardice." 

The benighted condition of the insurgents in this 
regard was directly traceable to the Iloilo fiasco. It 
was that, principally, which made the insurgents so 
foolishly over-confident and the subsequent slaughter 
of them so tremendous. Further on in his report Gen- 
eral Otis says, with perceptible petulance, in summing 
up his case against the Filipinos : 

The pretext that the United States was about to sub- 
stitute itself for Spain * * * was resorted to and had its 
effect on the ignorant masses. 

Speaking of his own modified version of the Benevo- 
lent Assimilation Proclamation, General Otis says 

( P . 76): 

No sooner was it published than it brought out a virtual 
declaration of war from, in this instance at least, the 
wretchedly advised President Aguinaldo, who, on January 
5 th, issued the following 

■ — giving the reply proclamation in full. No man can 
read the Otis report itself without feeling that if he, the 



Otis and Aguinaldo 169 

reader, had been playing Aguinaldo 's hand he would 
have played it exactly as Aguinaldo did. To General 
Otis the government at Malolos — " their Malolos 
arrangement," he used to call it — seemed quite an 
impudent little opera-bouffe affair, "a tin-horn govern- 
ment," as Senator Spooner suggested in the same debate 
on the treaty, in which he called his rugged and fiery 
friend from South Carolina, Senator Tillman, ''the 
Senator from Aguinaldo," and immediately thereafter, 
with that engaging frankness that always so endeared 
him to his colleagues on both sides of the Chamber, 
removed the sting from the jest by admitting that 
neither he (Spooner) , nor Tillman, nor anybody else in 
the United States, knew anything about Aguinaldo or 
his government. But in the calmer retrospect of many 
years after, we have seen, through the official docu- 
ments which have become available in the interval, 
that said government was in complete and effec- 
tive control of practically the whole archipelago, and 
had the moral support of the whole population at 
a time when our troops controlled absolutely nothing 
but the two towns of Manila and Cavite. Therefore, 
when we read in the Aguinaldo proclamation such 
phrases as, "In view of this, I summoned a council 
of my generals and asked the advice of my cabinet, 
and in conformity with the opinion of both bodies 
I" did so and so; "My government cannot remain 
indifferent to" this or that act of the Americans as- 
suming sovereignty over the islands; "Thus it is 
that my government is disposed to open hostilities 
if" etc.; they do not sound to us so irritatingly bom- 
bastic as they did to General Otis, distributed under his 
nose as the proclamation containing them at once was, 
by thousands, throughout a city of which he was nomi- 
nally in possession, but nine-tenths of whose 300,000 



170 American Occupation of Philippines 

inhabitants he was obliged to believe in sympathy with 
the insurgents. 

''My government," says the Aguinaldo proclama- 
tion, ''rules the whole of Luzon, the Visayan Islands, 
and a part of Mindanao." Except as to Mindanao, 
which cut absolutely no figure in the insurrection until 
well toward the end of the guerrilla part of it, we have 
already examined this claim and found by careful 
analysis that it was absolutely true by the end of 
December, 1898. 

After a rapid review of how he had been aided and 
encouraged in starting the revolution against the Span- 
iards by Admiral Dewey, and then given the cold shoul- 
der by the army when it came, Aguinaldo' s manifesto 
says: 

It was also taken for granted that the American forces 
would necessarily sympathize with the revolution which 
they had managed to encourage, and which had saved them 
much blood and great hardships; and, above all, we enter- 
tained absolute confidence in the history and traditions of 
a people which fought for its independence and for the 
abolition of slavery, and which posed as the champion and 
liberator of oppressed peoples. We felt ourselves under the 
safeguard of a free people. 

That this statement also was authorized by the facts 
is evident from the minutes of the Hong Kong meeting 
of May 4th, already noticed, presided over by Aguinaldo, 
and called to formulate the programme for the insur- 
rection he was about to sail for the Philippines to in- 
augurate, in which, after much discussion among the 
revolutionary leaders it was agreed that while they must 
be prepared for all possible contingencies, yet, 

if Washington proposes to carry out the fundamental 
principles of its constitution, it is most improbable that an 



Otis and Aguinaldo 171 

attempt will be made to colonize the Filipinos or annex 
them. z 

In short, the Aguinaldo proclamation of January 5th 
suggests with a briefness which Filipino familiarity with 
the great mass of facts already laid before the reader 
in the preceding chapters made appropriate, all the 
causes for which the Malolos Government was ready, 
if need be, to declare war, and winds up by boldly serv- 
ing General Otis with notice that if the Americans try 
to take Iloilo and the Visayan Islands "my government 
is disposed to open hostilities." 

On January 9th President McKinley cabled out to 
General Otis asking if it would help matters to send a 
commission out to explain to the Filipinos our benevo- 
lent intentions. This idea thus suggested materialized, 
a few weeks later, in the Schurman Commission, of 
which more anon. The next day, January 10th, Gen- 
eral Otis answered endorsing the sending of " commis- 
sioners of tact and discretion," and adding: 1 

Great difficulty is that leaders cannot control ignorant 
classes. 2 

As a matter of fact the leaders were leading. They 
were not arguing with the tide. They were merely 
riding the crest of it. Actually, General Otis would have 
stopped "The Six Hundred Marseillaise Who Knew 
How to Die" — the ones whose march to Paris, accord- 
ing to Thomas Carlyle, inspired the composition of the 
French national air, "The Marseillaise" — and tried 
to parley with the head of the column on the idea of 
getting them to abandon their enterprise and disperse 
to their several homes. He also says, in the cablegram 
under consideration: 

1 Senate Document 208, pt. 2, p. 7. 2 Otis Report, p. 80. 



172 American Occupation of Philippines 

If peace kept for several days more immediate danger 
will have passed. 

In other words, he was holding off the calf as best he 
could pending the ratification of the treaty. From 
the text itself, however, of General Otis's report, it is 
clear enough, that even he was getting anxious to give 
the Filipinos a drubbing as soon as the treaty should 
be safely passed. Referring to a message from the 
President enjoining avoidance of a clash with the 
Filipinos he says (p. 80) : 

The injunction of his Excellency the President of the 
United States to exert ourselves to preserve the peace had 
an excellent effect upon the command. Officers and men 
* * * were restless under the restraints * * * imposed, 
and * * * eager to avenge the insults received. Now they 
submit very quietly to the taunts and aggressive demon- 
strations of the insurgent army who continue to throng the 
streets of the business portion of the city. 

See the lamb kick the lion viciously in the face, and 
observe the lion as he first lifts his eyes heavenward and 
says meekly: "Thy will be done. This is Benevolent 
Assimilation ' ' ; and then turns them Senate-ward and 
murmurs : ' ' I cannot stand this much longer, kind sirs. 
Say when ! ' ' The way war correspondent John F. Bass 
puts the situation about this time in a letter to his 
paper, Harper's Weekly, was this: 

Jimmie Green 1 bites his lip, hangs on to himself, and 
finds comfort in the idea that his time will come. 

After Aguinaldo's ultimatum of January 5th about 
fighting if we took Iloilo, General Otis refrained from 
taking Iloilo, and continued to communicate with the 

1 The American "Tommy Atkins." 



Otis and Aguinaldo 173 

insurgent chieftain, appointing commissioners to meet 
commissioners appointed by him. These held divers 
and sundry sessions, whose only result was to kill time, 
or at least to mark time, while the Administration was 
getting the treaty through the Senate. The object of 
these meetings is thus set forth in the military order of 
January 9, 1899, appointing the Otis portion of the 
Joint High Parle}dng Board: 

To meet a commission of like number appointed by Gen- 
eral Aguinaldo, and to confer with regard to the situation of 
affairs and to arrive at a mutual understanding of the intent, 
purposes, aim, and desires of the Filipino people and the 
people of the United States, that peace and harmonious 
relations between these respective peoples may be con- 
tinued. x 

The minutes of the first meeting of this board, pre- 
pared by the Spanish-speaking clerk or recorder, recite 
the above declared purpose verbatim, in all its verbosity, 
and then go on to say that our side asked 

That the commissioners appointed by General Aguinaldo 
give their opinion as to what were the purposes, aspira- 
tions, aims, and desires of the people of the archipelago. 

The next paragraph is almost Pickwickian in its 
unconscious terseness : 

To this request the commissioners appointed by General 
Aguinaldo made response that in their opinion the aspira- 
tions, purposes, and desires of the Philippine people might 
be summed up in two words " Absolute Independence." 

Of course even General Otis does not reproduce this 
laconic answer as part of his petulant summing up of 
how little the Filipinos knew, before the outbreak of 

1 Otis Report, 1899, War Dept. Rpt., 1899, vo *- *•> pt« 4, p. 81. 



174 American Occupation of Philippines 

February 4th, as to what they really wanted. He merely 
alludes to it as being of record elsewhere. It is one of 
the various pieces of jetsam and flotsam that have 
floated from the sea of those great events to the shores 
of government publications since. The minutes of 
these meetings may be found among the hearings 
before the Senate Committee of 1902. x 

General Otis's report complains that Aguinaldo's 
commissioners did not know what they wanted, ''could 
not give any satisfactory explanation' ' of the " meas- 
ure of protection" they wanted, they having declared 
that they would greatly prefer the United States to 
establish a protectorate over them to keep them from 
being annexed by some other power. But he fails to 
state, which is a fact shown by the minutes of the meet- 
ing of January 14 (p. 2721), that the Filipino commis- 
sioners did say that this was a question which would 
only be reached between their government and ours 
when the latter should agree to officially recognize the 
former. To quote their exact language, which is rather 
clumsily translated, they said: "The aspiration of the 
Filipino people is the independence with the restrictions 
resulting from the conditions which its government 
may agree with the American, when the latter agree to 
officially recognize the former" 

It is perfectly clear from the voluminous minutes of 
the proceedings that the Filipinos were only seeking 
some declaration of the purpose of our government which 
would satisfy their people that the programme was some- 
thing more than a mere change of masters. "They 
begged," says General Otis (p. 82), "for some tangible 
concession from the United States Government — one 
which they could present to the people and which might 
serve to allay excitement." General Otis of course 

1 See Senate Document 331, 1902, p. 2709 et seq. 



Otis and Aguinaldo 175 

had no authority to bind the government and so could 
make no promise. But the day this Otis-Aguinaldo 
parleying board had its second meeting, January nth, 
and probably with no more knowledge of its existence 
than the reader has of what is going on in the Fiji 
Islands at the moment he reads these lines, Senator 
Bacon introduced in the United States Senate some 
resolutions which were precisely the medicine the cas.e 
required and precisely the thing the Filipinos were 
pleading for. These resolutions concluded thus: 

That the United States hereby disclaim any disposition or 
intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control 
over said islands except for the pacification thereof, and 
assert their determination when an independent government 
shall have been duly erected therein entitled to recognition 
as such, to transfer to said government, upon terms which 
shall be reasonable and just, all rights secured under the 
cession by Spain, and to thereupon leave the government 
and control of the islands to their people. 

They were a twin brother to the Teller Cuban resolu- 
tion which was incorporated into the resolution declar- 
ing war against Spain, being verbatim the same, except 
with the necessary changes of name, of "islands" for 
" island," etc. 

On January 18th, while the futile parleying board 
aforesaid was still futilely parleying at Manila, Senator 
Bacon made an argument in the Senate in support of 
his resolution, whose far-sighted statesmanship, con- 
sidered in relation to the analogies of its historic setting, 
most strikingly reminds us of Burke's great speech on 
conciliation with America delivered under similar cir- 
cumstances nearly a century and a quarter earlier. 
After alluding to the naturalness of the apprehension 
of the Filipinos "that it is the purpose of the United 



176 American Occupation of Philippines 

States Government to maintain permanent dominion 
over them," 1 Senator Bacon urged: 

The fundamental requirement in these resolutions is that 
the Government of the United States will not undertake to 
exercise permanent dominion over the Philippine Islands. 
The resolutions are intentionally made broad, so that those 
who agree on that fundamental proposition may stand upon 
them even though they may differ materially as to a great 
many other things relative to the future course of the gov- 
ernment in connection with the Philippine Islands. 

Senator Bacon then quoted the following from some 
remarks Senator Foraker had previously made in the 
course of the great debate on the treaty : 

I do not understand anybody to be proposing to take the 
Philippine Islands with the idea and view of permanently 
holding them. * * * The President of the United States 
does not, I know, and no Senator in this chamber has made 
any such statement ; 

and added: 

If the views expressed by the learned Senator from Ohio 
in his speech * * * are those upon which we are to act, 
there is very little difference between us; and there will be 
no future contention between us * * * if we can have an 
authoritative expression from the law-making power 
of the United States in a joint resolution that such is 
the purpose of the future. 2 

Says the Holy Scripture: "A word spoken in season, 
how good is it!" Had the Bacon resolutions passed 
the United States Senate in January, 1899, we never 
would have had any war with the Filipinos. 3 They 

1 Congressional Record, January 11, 1899, p. 735. 

2 76., January 18, 1899, p. 733. 

3 The vote on the Bacon resolution was a tie, 29 to 29, and the Vice- 
President of the United States then cast the deciding vote against it. 
Cong. Rec, Feby. 14, 1899, p. 1845. 



Otis and Aguinaldo 177 

would have presented at the psychologic moment the 
very thing the best and bravest of the Filipino leaders 
were then pleading with General Otis for, something 
"tangible," something "which they could present to 
their people and which would allay excitement," by 
allaying the universal fear that we were going to do 
with them exactly as all other white men they had ever 
heard of had done with all other brown men they had 
ever heard of under like circumstances, viz., keep them 
under permanent dominion with a view of profit. 

In his letter accepting the nomination for the Presi- 
dency in 1900, Mr. McKinley sought to show the Fili- 
pinos to have been the aggressors in the war by a 
reference to the fact that the outbreak occurred while the 
Bacon resolution was under discussion in the Senate. 
This hardly came with good grace from an Administra- 
tion whose friends in the Senate had all along opposed not 
only the Bacon resolution but also all other resolutions 
frankly declaratory of the purpose of our government. 
The supreme need of the hour then was, and the supreme 
need of every hour of every day we have been in the 
Philippines since has been, " an authoritative expression 
from the law-making power of the United States" — not 
mere surmises of a President, confessedly devoid of 
binding force, but an authoritative expression from the 
law-making power, declaratory of the purpose of our gov- 
ernment with regard to the Philippine Islands. Secre- 
tary of War Taft visited Manila in 1907 to be present at 
the opening of the Philippine Assembly. In view of the 
universal longing which he knew existed for some definite 
authoritative declaration as to whether our government 
intends to keep the Islands permanently or not, he said: 

I cannot speak with authority * * *. The policy to be 
pursued with respect to them is, therefore, ultimately for 



178 American Occupation of Philippines 

Congress to determine. * * * I have no authority to speak 
for Congress in respect to the ultimate disposition of the 
Islands. * 

This bitter disappointment of the public expectation 
and hope of something definite, certainly did not lessen 
the belief of the Filipinos that we have no notion of 
ever giving them their independence. Had the Senate 
known what the Filipino commissioners were so 
earnestly asking of the Otis commissioners in January, 
1899, the Bacon resolution would probably have 
passed. In fact it is demonstrable almost mathemati- 
cally that, had the Administration's friends in the 
Senate allowed that resolution to come to a vote 
before the outbreak of February 4th, instead of fili- 
bustering against it until after that event, it would 
have passed. As stated in the foot-note, the roll-call 
on the final vote on it, which was not taken until Feb- 
ruary 14th, showed a tie — 29 to 29, the Vice-President 
of the United States casting the deciding vote which 
defeated it. Much dealing with real life and real death 
has blunted my artistic sensibilities to thrills from the 
mere pantomime of the stage. But as here was a vote 
where, had a single Senator who voted No voted Aye, 
some 300,000,000 of dollars, over a thousand lives of 
American soldiers killed in battle, some 16,000 lives of 
Filipino soldiers killed in battle, and possibly 100,000 
Filipino lives snuffed out through famine, pestilence, 
and other ills consequent on the war, would have been 
saved, I can not refrain from reproducing the vote — 
perhaps the most uniquely momentous single roll-call 
in the parliamentary history of Christendom 2 : 

1 See Present-Day Problems, by Wm. H. Taft, p. 9; Dodd, Mead, 
& Co., N. Y., 1908. 

2 Congressional Record, February 14, 1899, p. 1846 (55th Cong., 3d 
Sess.). 



Otis and Aguinaldo 



179 



Ayes 



Bacon 


Faulkner 


Jones of Arkansas 


Perkins 


Bate 


Gorman 


Jones of Nevada 


Pettigrew 


Berry- 


Gray 


Lindsay 


Pettus 


Caff ery 


Hale 


McLaurin 


Quay 


Chilton 


Harris 


Martin 


Rawlins 


Clay 


Heitfield 


Money- 


Smith 


Cockrell 


Hoar 


Murphy 
Nays 


Tillman 
Turner 


Allison 


Gear 


McMillan 


Pritchard 


Burrows 


Hanna 


Mantle 


Ross 


Carter 


Hawley 


Morgan 


' Shoup 


Chandler 


Kyle 


Nelson 


Simon 


Deboe 


Lodge 


Penrose 


Stewart 


Fairbanks 


McBride 


Piatt of Connecticut 


Teller 


Frye 


McEnery 


Piatt of New York 


Warren 
Wolcott 



In January, 1899, the out-and-out land-grabbers had 
not yet made bold to show their hand, the friends of 
the treaty confining themselves to the alleged shame of 
doing as we had done with Cuba, on account of the 
supposed semi-barbarous condition of "the various 
tribes out there," leaving the possibility of profit to 
quietly suggest itself amid the noisy exhortations of 
altruism. It was not until after the milk of human 
kindness had been spilled in war that Senator Lodge 
said at the Philadelphia National Republican Conven- 
tion of 1900: 

We make no hypocritical pretence of being interested in 
the Philippines solely on account of others. We believe 
in Trade Expansion. 

Speaking (p. 82) of the meetings of what for lack of 
a better term I have above called the Otis-Aguinaldo 
Joint High Parleying Board, General Otis says in his 
report : 



180 American Occupation of Philippines 

Finally, the conferences became the object of insurgent 
suspicion, * * * and * * * amusement. 

The Filipino newspapers called attention to the fact 
that large reinforcements of American troops were on 
the way to Manila, and very plausibly inferred that the 
parleying was for delay only. By January 26th the 
politeness of both the American and the Filipino com- 
missioners had been worn to a frazzle, and they ad- 
journed, each recognizing that the differences between 
them could ultimately be settled only on the field of 
battle, in the event of the ratification of the treaty. 

January 27th, General Otis cabled to Washington a 
letter from Aguinaldo, of which he says in his report : 
"I was surprised * * * because of the boldness with 
which he therein indicated his purpose to continue 
his assumptions and establish their correctness by 
the arbitrament of war" (p. 84). General Otis was 
" surprised" to the last. Aguinaldo's letter is not at 
all surprising, though extremely interesting. It sends 
General Otis a proclamation issued January 21st, an- 
nouncing the publication of a constitution modelled 
substantially after that of the United States, even be- 
ginning with the familiar words about "securing the 
blessings of liberty, promoting the general welfare," 
etc., and concludes with an expression of confident hope 
that the United States will recognize his government, 
and a bold implication of determination to fight if it 
does not. On the evening of February 4th an insurgent 
soldier approaching an American picket failed to halt 
or answer when challenged, and was shot and killed. 
Nearly six months of nervous tension thereupon pressed 
for liberation in a general engagement which continued 
throughout the night and until toward sundown of the 
next day, thus finally unleashing the dogs of war. In 



Otis and Aguinaldo 181 

the Washington Post of February 6, 1899, Senator 
Bacon is quoted as saying : 

I will cheerfully vote all the money that may be necessary 
to carry on the war in the Philippines, but I still maintain 
that we could have avoided a conflict with those people 
had the Senate adopted my resolution, or a similar reso- 
lution announcing our honest intentions with regard to the 
Philippines. 

Said the New York Criterion of February 11, 1899: 

Whether we like it or not, we must go on slaughtering 
the natives in the English fashion, and taking what muddy 
glory lies in this wholesale killing until they have learned to 
respect our arms. The more difficult task of getting them to 
respect our intentions will follow. 

The Washington Post of February 6, 1899, may not 
have quoted Senator Bacon with exactitude. But 
what the Senator did say on the floor of the Senate is 
important, historically. Under date of February 22, 
19 1 2, Senator Bacon writes me, in answer to an inquiry: 

I enclose a speech made by me upon the subject in the 
Senate February 27, 1899, and upon pages 6, 7, and 8 of 
which you will find a statement of my position, and the 
reasons given by me therefor. Of course you cannot go at 
length into that question in your narration of the events of 
that day, but my position was that, while I did not approve 
of the war, and did not approve of the enslavement of the 
Filipinos, and while if I had my way I would immediately 
set them free, at the same time, as war was then flagrant, 
and there were then some twenty odd thousand American 
troops in the Philippine Islands, we must either support 
them or leave them to defeat and death. I do not know 
how far you can use anything then said by me, but if you 
make allusion to the fact that I was willing to supply money 



1 82 American Occupation of Philippines 

and troops to carry on the war in the Philippines, I would 
be glad for it to be accompanied by a very brief statement 
of the ground upon which I based such action. 

The above makes it unnecessary to quote at length 
from the speech referred to, which may be found at pp. 
2456 et seq of the Congressional Record for February 
27, 1899. However, there is one passage in the speech 
to which I especially say Amen, and invite all whose 
creed of patriotism is not too sublimated for such a 
common feeling to join me in so doing. Senator Bacon 
will now state the creed : 

The oft-repeated expression "our country, right or 
wrong" has a vital principle in it, and upon that principle 
I stand. 

The Senator immediately follows his creed with these 
commentaries : 

In this annexation of the Philippine Islands through the 
ratification of the treaty, and in waging war to subjugate 
the Filipinos, I think the country, acting through consti- 
tutional authorities, is wrong. But it is not for me to say 
because the country has been committed to a policy that 
I do not favor and have opposed, in consequence of which 
there is war, that I will not support the government. 

Under the civilizing influence of Krag-Jorgensen 
rifles and the moral uplift of high explosive projectiles, 
what our soldiers used to call, with questionable piety, 
" the fear of God," w T as finally put into the hearts of the 
Filipinos, after much carnage by wholesale in battle 
formation and later by retail in a species of guerrilla 
warfare as irritating as it was obstinate. But they 
have never yet learned to respect our intentions, because 
under the guidance of three successive Presidents we 



Otis and Aguinaldo 183 

have studiously refrained from any authoritative dec- 
laration as to what those intentions are. We are loth 
to hark back to the only right course, a course similar 
to our action in Cuba, because of the expense we have 
been to in the Philippines. But we also know that the 
islands are and are likely to continue, a costly burden, 
a nuisance, and a distinct strategic disadvantage in the 
event of war; and that Mr. Cleveland was right when 
he said: 

The government of remote and alien people should have 
no permanent place in the purposes of our national life. 

The mistaken policy which involved us in a war to 
subjugate the Filipinos, following our war to free the 
Cubans, will never stand atoned for before the bar of 
history, nor can the Filipinos ever in reason be expected 
to respect our intentions, until the law-making power 
of the government shall have authoritatively declared 
what those intentions are — i. e. t what we intend ulti- 
mately to do with the islands. Senator Bacon's reso- 
lutions of 1899 were, are, and always will be the last 
word on the first act needed to rectify the original 
Philippine blunder, " announcing " as they would, to use 
the language attributed to their distinguished author 
by the Washington Post of February 6, 1899, above- 
quoted, "our honest intentions with regard to the Phil- 
ippines." So eager is the exploiter to exploit the 
islands, and so apprehensive is the Filipino that the 
exploiter will have more influence at Washington than 
himself and therefore be able ultimately to bring about 
a practical industrial slavery, that common honesty 
demands such a declaration. To doctor present Fili- 
pino discontent with Benevolent Uncertainty is a mere 
makeshift. The remedy the situation needs is simple, 
but as yet untried — Frankness. The chief of the 



184 American Occupation of Philippines 

causes of the present discontent among the Filipinos 
with American rule is precisely the same old serpent 
that precipitated the war thirteen years ago, to wit, 
lack of a frank and honest declaration of our purpose. 
The trouble then lay, and still lies, and, in the absence 
of some such declaration as that proposed by the Bacon 
resolution, will always lie in what seemed then, and 
still seems, to the Filipinos " an evident purpose to keep 
the islands and an accompanying unwillingness to 
acknowledge that purpose." Some may object that 
one Congress cannot bind another. The same argu- 
ment would have killed the Teller amendment to the 
declaration of war with Spain avowing our purpose 
as to Cuba. Such an argument assumes that this 
nation has no sense of honor, and that it should cling 
for a while longer to the stale Micawberism that the 
Islands may yet pay, before it decides whether it will 
do right or not, and signalizes such decision by formal 
announcement through Congress. To men capable of 
such an assumption as the one just indicated, this book 
is not addressed. Three successive Presidents, Messrs. 
McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft, have with earnest 
asseveration of benevolent intention tried without suc- 
cess all these years to win the affections of the Filipino 
people, and to make them feel that "our flag had not 
lost its gift of benediction in its world-wide journey to 
their shores," as Mr. McKinley used to say. But the 
corner-stone of the policy was laid before we knew 
anything about how the land lay, and on the assump- 
tion, made practically without any knowledge what- 
ever on the subject, that the Filipino people were 
incapable of self-government. The corner-stone of our 
Philippine policy has been from the beginning precisely 
that urged by Spain for not freeing Cuba, viz., "to 
spare the people from the dangers of premature inde- 



Otis and Aguinaldo 185 

pendence." The three Presidents named above have 
always been willing to imply independence, but never 
to promise it. And the unwillingness to declare a 
purpose ultimately to give the Filipinos their indepen- 
dence has always been due to the desire to catch the 
vote of those who are determined they shall never have 
it. In this inexorable and unchangeable political 
necessity lies the essential contemptibleness of repub- 
lican imperialism, and the secret of why the Filipinos, 
notwithstanding our good intentions, do not like us, 
and never will under the present policy. How can 
you blame them? 

Yet the more you know of the Filipinos, the better 
you like them. Self-sacrificing, brave, and faithful unto 
death in war, they are gentle, generous, and tractable 
in peace. Moreover, respect for constituted authority, 
as such, is innate in practically every Filipino, which I 
am not sure can be predicated concerning each and 
every citizen of my beloved native land. And we can 
win the grateful and lasting affection of the whole seven 
or eight millions of them any day we wish to. How? 
Have done with vague, vote-catching Presidential 
obiter, and through your Congress declare your purpose ! 



CHAPTER XI 
Otis and the War 

Am I the boss, or am I a tool, 

Am I Governor-General or a hobo — hobo; 

Now I 'd like to know who 's the boss of the show, 

Is it me, or Emilio Aguinaldo? 

A rmy Song of the Philippines under Otis. 

1 1 rr\ j^£ th^g i s on, ' ' said General Hughes, Provost Mar- 
I shal of Manila, to General Otis,- at Malacanan 
palace, on the night of February 4, 1899, about half 
past eight o'clock, as soon as the firing started. 1 He 
was talking about something which every American in 
Manila except General Otis had for months frankly 
recognized as inevitable — the war. 

On the day of the outbreak of February 4th, General 
Otis had under his command 838 officers and 20,032 
enlisted men, say in round numbers a total of 21,000. 
Of these some 15,500 were State volunteers mostly from 
the Western States, and the rest were regulars. All the 
volunteers and 1650 of the regulars were, or were about 
to become, entitled to their discharge, and their right 
was perfected by the exchange of ratifications of the 
treaty of peace with Spain on April 1 1 , 1899. The total 
force which he was thus entitled to command for any 
considerable period consisted of less than 4000. Of the 

1 See General Hughes's testimony before Senate Committee, 1902, 
Senate Document jji, p. 508. 

186 



Otis and the War 187 

21,000 men on hand as aforesaid, on February 4th, 
deducting those at Cavite and Iloilo, the sick and 
wounded, those serving in civil departments, and in 
the staff organizations, the effective fighting force was 
14,000, and of these 3000 constituted the Provost 
Guard in the great and hostile city of Manila. * Thus 
there were only 11,000 men, including those entitled 
to discharge, available to engage the insurgent army, 
"which," says Secretary of War Root, "was two or 
three times that number, well armed and equipped, 
and included many of the native troops formerly com- 
prised in the Spanish army." 

Such was the predicament into which General Otis's 
supremely zealous efforts to help the Administration 
get the treaty through the Senate by withholding from 
the American people the knowledge of facts which 
might have put them on notice that they were pay- 
ing $20,000,000 for a $200,000,000 insurrection, had 
brought us. This is not a tale of woe. It is a tale of the 
disgust — good-humored, because stoical — which finally 
found expression at the time in the army song that 
heads this chapter, disgust at unnecessary sacrifice of 
American life which could so easily have been pre- 
vented had General Otis only revealed the real situation 
in time to have had plenty of troops on hand. It is 
a'fequiem over those brave men of the Eighth Army 
Corps from Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and the Western 
States that bore the brunt of the early fighting, whose 
lives were needlessly sacrificed in 1899 as the result of 
an unpreparedness for war due to anxiety not to embar- 
rass Mr. McKinley in his efforts to get the treaty 
through the Senate, an unpreparedness which remained 
long unremedied thereafter in order to conceal from the 

1 See Annual Report of the Secretary of War to the President for 1899, 
pp. 7 et seq. 



1 88 American Occupation of Philippines 

people of the United States the unanimity of the desire 
of the Filipinos for Independence. 

It is quite true that none of our people then in the 
Islands realized this unanimity in all its pathos at the 
outset, but it soon became clear to everybody except 
the commanding general. It naturally dawned on him 
last of all, because he did not visit the most reliable 
sources of information, to wit, the battlefields during 
the fighting, and therefore did not see how tenaciously 
the Filipinos fought for the independence of their coun- 
try. Moreover, General Otis tried to think till the last 
along lines in harmony with the original theory of 
Benevolent Assimilation. Hence Mr. Root's nonsense 
of 1899 an d 1900 about "the patient and unconsenting 
millions" dominated by "the Tagalo tribe," which 
nonsense was immensely serviceable in a campaign for 
the presidency wherein antidotes for sympathy with a 
people struggling to be free were of supreme practical 
political value. General Otis actually had Mr. McKin- 
ley believing as late as December, 1899, at least, that 
the opposition to a change of masters in lieu of Free- 
dom was confined to a little coterie of self-seeking poli- 
ticians who were in the business for what they could 
get out of it, and that the great majority would prefer 
him, Otis, to Aguinaldo, as governor-general. It is 
difficult on first blush to accept this statement as dis- 
passionately correct, but there is no escape from the 
record. Mr. McKinley said in his annual message 
to Congress in December, 1899, in reviewing the 
direction he gave to the Paris peace negotiations 
which ended in the purchase of the islands, and the 
war with the Filipinos which had followed, and had 
then been raging since February 4th previous, "I had 
every reason to believe, and still believe that the 
transfer of sovereignty was in accordance with the 



Otis and the War 189 

wishes and aspirations of the great mass of the Filipino 
people." 

Yet every American soldier who served in the Philip- 
pines at the time knows that Aguinaldo held the whole 
people in the hollow of his hand, because he was their 
recognized leader, the incarnation of their aspirations. x 

During the presidential campaign of 1900, while the 
war with the Filipinos was still raging, partisan rancour 
bitterly called in question the sincerity of President 
McKinley's statement in his annual message to Con- 
gress of December, 1899, that he then still believed "the 
transfer of sovereignty was in accord with the wishes 
and aspirations of the great mass of the Filipino people," 
on the ground that he must by the time he made 
that statement have understood how grossly — however 
honestly — General Otis had misled him as to the 
unanimity and tenacity of the Filipino purpose. But it 
is only necessary to read Admiral Dewey's testimony 
before the Senate Committee of 1902 to understand Mr. 
McKinley's allusion in this same message to Congress 
of 1899 to "the sinister ambition of a few leaders," and 
this, once understood, explains the other statement of 
the message. Admiral Dewey came home in the fall 
of 1899 and undoubtedly filled Mr. McKinley with the 
estimate of Aguinaldo which makes such painful read- 
ing in the Admiral's testimony of 1902 before the Senate 
Committee, where he abused Aguinaldo like a pick- 
pocket, so to speak, saying his original motive was prin- 
cipally loot. 2 In the fall of 1899 Aguinaldo had issued 
a proclamation claiming that Admiral Dewey originally 



1 This is no mere attempt at rhetorical decoration. Said General 
MacArthur to the Senate Committee in 1902 concerning Aguinaldo; 
" He was the incarnation of the feelings of the Filipinos." Senate Docu* 
ment 331, 1902, p. 1926. 

2 Senate Document 331, 1902, pp. 2927 et seq. 



190 American Occupation of Philippines 

promised him independence, and Admiral Dewey had 
bitterly denounced this as a falsehood, so that the 
Admiral always cherished a very real resentment 
against the insurgent chief thereafter. His estimate 
of the Filipino leader as being in the insurrection merely 
for what he could get out of it was wholly erroneous, 
and has long since been exploded, all our generals of 
the early fighting and all Americans who have known 
him since being unanimous that Aguinaldo was and is a 
sincere patriot ; but it undoubtedly explains Mr. McKin- 
ley's still clinging, in 1899, to the notion derived from 
General Otis that the insurrection did not have the 
moral and material backing of the whole Filipino people. 
\l The Filipino leaders were familiar with the spirit of our 
institutions. The men who controlled their counsels 
were high-minded, educated, patriotic men. "For 
myself and the officers and men under my command," 
wrote General Merritt to Aguinaldo in August, 1898, 
just after the fall of Manila, "I can say that we have 
conceived a high respect for the abilities and qualities 
of the Filipinos, and if called upon by the Government 
to express an opinion, it will be to that effect." x 

The leaders believed that the American people did 
not fully understand the identity of the Philippine 
situation with that in Cuba, and that if they had, the 
treaty would not have been ratified. They also knew 
the supreme futility of trying to get the facts before 
the American people by peaceful means. And it was 
really with the abandon of genuine patriotism that they 
plunged their country into war. We did not know it 
then, but we do know it now. It would be simply 
wooden-headed to affirm that they ever expected to 
succeed in a war with us. Of course some of the 
jeunesse doree, as General Bell calls them in one of 

1 Senate Document 208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 23. 



Otis and the War 191 

his early reports, 1 grew very aggressive and insulting 
toward the last. But the thinking men went into the 
war for independence in a spirit of ''decent respect to 
the opinions of mankind," to correct the impression 
General Otis had communicated to Mr. McKinley, 
and through him to our people, in the hope that the 
more lives they sacrificed in such a war (they risked- - 
and many of them lost — their own also), the nearer 
they would come to refuting the idea that they did not 
know what they wanted. It was the only way they 
had to appeal to Csesar, i.e., to the great heart of the 
American people. As the war grew more and more 
unpopular in the United States, the impression was 
more and more nursed here at home that the people 
did not really want independence, but were being co- 
erced; and that they were like dumb driven cattle. 
The striking similarity of these suggestions to those 
by which tyranny has always met the struggles of men 
to be free, did not seem to occur to the American public. 
They were accepted as authoritative, being convenient 
also as an antidote to sympathy. General Otis had 
suppressed such words as "sovereignty," "protection," 
and the like from his original sugar-coated edition of 
the Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, offering an 
elaborate cock-and-bull explanation of why he did so. 
The Filipino answer to this took the form of a very 
clever newspaper cartoon, representing an American 
in a carromata — a kind of two-wheeled buggy — with a 
Filipino between the shafts pulling it; which cartoon 
of course, never reached the United States. The 
Filipinos had never heard the story on General Mahone 
about "tie yoh hoss an' come in," 2 but they had heard 
of the jinrickshaws of Japan, and they had read in Holy 

1 Senate Document 62, 55th Cong., 3d Sess., 1898-9, p. 383. 

2 See end of Chapter IV. ante. 



-. 



192 American Occupation of Philippines 

Writ and elsewhere of conquered people becoming hew- 
ers of wood and drawers of water to invading conquerors. 
And they are not without a sense of humor. It is a 
common mistake with many Americans — for quite a 
few among us suffer intellectually from over-sophistica- 
tion — to suppose we monopolize all the sense of humor 
there is, and that that alone is proof of a due sense 
of proportion. At any rate, the Filipinos, with all due 
respect to General Otis's good intentions, understood 
that " sovereignty" and " protection" meant alien 
domination, so there was nothing in the Otis notion 
that for them those words had a "peculiar meaning 
which might be advantageously used by the Tagalo 
war party to incite," etc. 1 

Having now gotten into a war on the theory that 
only a small fraction of the Filipino people were opposed 
to a new and unknown yoke in lieu of the old one, Gen- 
eral Otis still continued to try to square his theory with 
the facts. For many months he sat at his desk in 
Manila cheerily waging war with an inadequate force, 
and retaining in the service and on the firing line after 
their terms of enlistment expired, under pretence that 
they consented to it willingly, a lot of fellows from Penn- 
sylvania, Tennessee, and the Western States, who had 
volunteered for the war with Spain, with intent to kill 
Spaniards in order to free Cubans, and not with intent 
to kill Filipinos for also wanting to be free. Seeing 
nothing of the fighting himself, he of course failed to 
get a correct estimate of the tenacity of the Filipino 
purpose. No purpose is here entertained to suggest 
that any of those early volunteers went around preach- 
ing mutiny, or feeling mutinous. They did not origi- 
nally like the Filipinos especially; furthermore, they 
liked the Philippines less than they did the Filipinos, 

1 Otis Report for i8gg, p. 66. 



Otis and the War 193 

and they had a vague notion that some one had blun- 
dered. But it was not theirs to ask the reason why. 
Besides, the orders from Washington being not to clash 
with the Filipinos at least until the treaty was ratified, 
the Filipino soldiers and subaltern officers had been 
calling them cowards for some time with impunity. So 
that as soon as the treaty was safely ' ' put over, ' ' they were 
very glad to let off steam by killing a few hundred of them. 
But their hearts were not in the fight, in the sense of 
clear and profound conviction of the righteousness of the 
war. However, war is war, and they were soldiers, and 
"orders is orders," as Tommy Atkins says. So let us 
turn to an honest er, if grimmer, side of the picture. 

The first battle of the war began about 8 : 30 o'clock 
on the night of February 4th, and lasted all through that 
night and until about 5 o'clock in the afternoon of the 
next day. Our casualties numbered about 250 killed 
and wounded. The insurgent loss was estimated at 
3000. " Those of the insurgents will never be known, " 
says General Otis. 1 "We buried 700 of them." 2 
There was fighting pretty much all around Manila, for 
the insurgents had the city almost hemmed in. An arc 
of a circle, broken in places possibly, but several miles 
long, drawn about the city, would probably suggest 
the general idea of the enemy's lines. They had been 
allowed to dig trenches without interference while the 
debate in the Senate on the treaty was in progress, 
pursuant to the temporary " peace-at-any-price " pro- 
gramme. The arc was broken into smithereens by 5 p.m. 
of February 5th. When the morning of February 6th 
came Col. James F. Smith, commanding the First Cali- 
fornias, was non est inventus, and so was a large part of 
his regiment. "No one seemed to know definitely his 
location," says the Otis Report. 3 As a matter of fact 

1 Report, p. 99. a lb., p. ioo. 3 lb., p. 150. 



194 American Occupation of Philippines 

he had taken two battalions of his regiment and waded 
clean through the enemy's lines, and had to be sent 
for to come back to form again with the line of battle 
needed to protect the city. So the Californias prob- 
ably carried off the pick of the laurels of the first day's 
fighting. General Anderson, commanding the First 
Division of the Eighth Corps, threw them some very 
handsome well earned bouquets in his report, stating 
also that their colonel had shown "the very best 
qualities of a volunteer officer" — why he limited it to 
"volunteer" does not appear, but is inferable from the 
well-known disposition of all regulars to consider all 
volunteers "rookies" 1 — and recommended that he be 
made a brigadier general, which shortly afterward was 
done. 2 

It would be invidious to follow the various phases of 
the subsequent early fighting, and single out one or 
more States 3 and tell of the hard earned and well de- 
served honors they won, because space forbids a proper 
tribute to the heroism of all of them. As for the regu- 
lars, 4 they were the same they were at Santiago de 
Cuba, the same they always are anywhere you put 
them. When a newspaper man would come around a 
regular regiment during the fighting before Santiago he 
would be told that they had no news to give him, ' ' "We 
ain't heroes, we 're regulars," they would say. After 

1 Raw recruits. 

2 War Department Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 375. 

3 There were thirteen States represented by at least one organization. 
These were the First Californias, Second Oregons, First Colorados, 
First Nebraskas, Tenth Pennsylvanias, Major Young's Utah Battery, 
the First Idahos, Thirteenth Minnesotas, the North Dakota Artillery, the 
Twentieth Kansas, and the Tennessees, Montanas, and Wyomings. 

4 The regular regiments represented were the 14th, 8th, and 23d In- 
fantry and 4th Cavalry. There were also some batteries of the Third 
Regular Artillery, and a number of Engineers, Hospital Corps, and 
Signal Corps people. 



Otis and the War 195 

the outbreak of February 4th, all our people did well, 
acted nobly, "Angels could no more." Neither could 
devils, as shown by the losses inflicted on the enemy. 

There was more fighting outside Manila during the 
next two or three days, and when that was done the 
somewhat shattered insurgent legions had recoiled to 
the distantly visible foot-hills, convinced that their 
notion they could take Manila was very foolish and 
very rash. 

At the town of Caloocan, some three or four miles 
out to the north of Manila, were located the shops 
and round houses of the Manila and Dagupan Railway, 
which runs from Manila in a northwesterly direction 
about 120 miles to Dagupan, and was then the only 
railroad in the archipelago. It was fed by a vast rich 
farming country, the great plain of central Luzon. 
Naturally, the central plain which fed the railroad that 
traversed it and kept its teeming myriads of small 
farmers in touch with the great outside world was to 
be sooner or later, the theatre of war. To seize trans- 
portation is instinctively the first tactical move of a 
military man. Lieutenant-General Luna, commander- 
in-chief, next to Aguinaldo, of the revolutionary forces, 
the man whom later Aguinaldo had shot, was just then 
at Caloocan with 4000 men. So it fell to General Mac- 
Arthur, commanding the Second Division of the Eighth 
Corps, to move on Caloocan, which he did on February 
loth. 

John F. Bass, correspondent for Harper's Weekly, 
writing from Manila a short time after this, describes 
this movement. It was our first move away from the 
city of Manila. With a few masterly strokes of the 
pen, which I regret there is not space to reproduce here 
in full, Mr. Bass gives a vivid picture of the various 
engagements, and of "a background of burning villages, 



196 American Occupation of Philippines 

smoke, fire, shot, and shell, the ceaseless tramp of tired 
and often bleeding feet," etc. ''Heroism," he says, 
"became a matter of course and death an incident." 
Finally his story pauses for a moment thus: "The nat- 
ural comment is that all this is merely war — the busi- 
ness of the soldier. True, nor do I think Jimmie Green 
[Mr. Bass's name for our "Tommy Atkins"] is troubled 
with heroics. He accepts the situation without excite- 
ment or hysterics. He has little feeling in this matter 
for his heart is not in this fight" Here brother Bass's 
moralizing ceases abruptly, and the contagious excite- 
ment of the hour catches him, just as it always does 
the average man under such circumstances: 

From La Loma church you may get the full view of our 
long line crossing the open field, evenly, steadily, irresistibly, 
like an inrolling wave on the beach * * *. Watch the regi- 
ments go forward, and form under fire, and move on and on, 
and you will exclaim: " Magnificent," and you will gulp a 
little and feel proud without exactly knowing why. Then 
gradually the power of that line will force itself upon you, 
and you will feel that you must follow, that wherever that 
line goes you must go also. By and by you will be sorry, 
but for the present the might of an American regiment has 
got possession of you. 

Anybody who has ever been with an American regi- 
ment in action knows exactly how the man who wrote 
that felt. The American who has never had the expe- 
rience Mr. Bass describes above has missed one way of 
realizing the majesty of the power of the republic where- 
of he is privileged to be a citizen. For if there is one 
national trait which more than any other explains the 
greatness of our country, it is the instinct for organi- 
zation, the fondness for self-multiplication to the n th 
power by intelligent co-operation with one's fellows to 



Otis and the War 197 

a common end. Especially is the experience in ques- 
tion inspiring where the example of the field officers is 
particularly appropriate to the occasion. Take for in- 
stance the following, concerning the conduct of Major 
J. Franklin Bell in this advance on Caloocan, from the 
report of Major Kobbe, Commanding the Artillery: 

As the right cleared the head of the ravine, I could see 
Maj. J. F. Bell * * * leading a company of Montana 
troops in front of the right * * * advancing, firing, toward 
intrenchments * * *. He was on a black horse to the 
last * * * leading and cheering the men. His work was 
most gallant and * * * especially cheering to me. x 

No mere scribe can magnify General Bell's matchless 
efficiency in action, but it is certainly inspiring to con- 
template. There are no "fuss and feathers" about 
him. Yet his power, proven on many a field in the 
Philippines, to kindle martial ardor by example, 
suggests the ubiquitous "Helmet of Navarre" of Lord 
Macaulay's poem. 

A little later correspondent Bass develops what he 
meant by "by and by you will be sorry." You see 
it is not comfortable business, this of hustling about 
among the dead and dying. In the excitement, you 
are so liable to step on the face of some poor devil you 
knew well, maybe a once warm friend. In this con- 
nection Mr. Bass says: "There is this difference be- 
tween the manner in which American and Filipino 
soldiers die. The American falls in a heap and dies 
hard ; the Filipino stretches himself out, and when dead 
is always found in some easy attitude, generally with 
his head on his arms. They die the way a wild animal 
dies — in just such a position as one finds a deer or an 
antelope which one has shot in the woods." 

1 War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 440. 



198 American Occupation of Philippines 

So far as the writer is advised and believes, nobody 
who knows John F. Bass ever suspected him of being 
a quitter. He must have been reading the London 
Standard, which said about that time: "It is a little 
startling to find the liberators of Cuba engaged in sup- 
pressing a youthful republic which claims the sacred 
right of self-government." Bass had written his news- 
paper in August previous, after observing how pluckily 
the Filipinos had fought and licked the Spaniards: 
"Give them their independence and guarantee it to 
them." The overwhelming sentiment of the Eighth 
Army Corps when we took the Philippines was against 
taking them; and those who had kept informed knew 
that the Senate had ratified the treaty by a majority 
only one more than enough to squeeze it through, the 
vote having been 57 to 27, at least 56 being thus indis- 
pensable to make the necessary constitutional two- 
thirds of the 84 votes cast ; and that Wall Street and the 
White Man's Burden or land-grabbing contingent — 
"Philanthropy and Five per cent," as Secretary of the 
Treasury Lyman J. Gage put it at the time — were 
responsible for these shambles Mr. Bass describes. 

At this juncture some soft-headed gentleman asks: 
"What is this man who writes this book driving at? 
Is he trying to show that the American soldiers in the 
Philippines in February, 1899, all wanted to quit as soon 
as the war broke out?" Not at all. In the first place 
it hardly lay in American soldier nature to want to quit 
when Aguinaldo was telling us "if you don't take your 
flag down and out of these islands at once and promptly 
get out yourselves along with it, I will proceed to kick 
you out and throw it out." And in the next place, in 
the war with the Filipinos, as in all other wars, fuel 
was added to the flame as soon as the war broke out. 
Among the Americans, charges soon came into general 



Otis and the War 199 

circulation and acceptance that the Filipinos had 
planned (but been frustrated in) a plot looking to a 
general massacre of all foreigners in Manila. This 
alleged plot was supposed to have been scheduled to be 
carried out on a certain night shortly after February 15, 
1899. Among the Filipinos, on the other hand, coun- 
ter-charges soon followed, and met with general cre- 
dence, that the Americans made a practise of killing 
prisoners taken in battle, including the wounded. 
Neither charge was ever proven, but both served the 
purpose, at the psychologic moment, of possessing each 
side with the desire to kill, which is the business of war. 
Let us glance briefly at these recriminations. 

Between pages 191 6 and 191 7 of Senate Document 
331, part 2 1 may be found a photo-lithograph of the 
celebrated alleged order of the Filipino Revolutionary 
Government of February 15, 1899, to massacre all 
foreign residents of Manila. In his report for 1899 2 
General Otis himself describes this order as one " which 
for barbarous intent is unequalled in these modern 
times in civilized warfare," and speaks of it as "issued 
by the Malolos Government through the responsible 
officer who had raised and organized the hostile inhabi- 
tants within the city." After Aguinaldo was captured 
in 1 90 1, according to an account given by General 
MacArthur to the Senate Committee in 1902, of a con- 
versation with the insurgent leader, the latter was 
shown a copy of this document purporting to have been 
signed by General Luna, one of his generals. He dis- 
claimed having in any way sanctioned it, in fact 
disclaimed any prior knowledge of it whatsoever, 3 a 
disclaimer which General MacArthur appears to have 

1 Hearings on affairs in Philippine Islands, 1902. 

2 War Department Report, 1899, vol. L, pt. 4, p. 109. 

3 Senate Document 331, p. 1890. 



200 American Occupation of Philippines 

accepted as true, frankly and entirely. At page 1890 
of the same volume, Captain J. R. M. Taylor, 14th U. S. 
Infantry, a gallant soldier and an accomplished scholar, 
who was in charge in 1901 of the captured insurgent 
records at Manila, states that he was "informed" that 
the document was originally " signed by Sandico, then 
Secretary of the Interior" of the revolutionary govern- 
ment. Captain Taylor made an attempt to run the 
matter down, but obtained no evidence convincing to 
him. A like investigation by General MacArthur in 
1 90 1 had a like result. 1 

On the other hand, Major Wm. H. Bishop, of the 
20th Kansas, was credited in a soldier's letter writ- 
ten home, which first came to light in this country, 
with killing unarmed prisoners during the advance on 
Caloocan. The charges originated with a private of 
that regiment. Major Bishop denied the charges. 2 
An investigation followed, in the course of which some- 
body made an innuendo, or charge — it is not important 
which — that other officers used their influence to pre- 
vent a full ventilation of the matter, specifically, 
General Funston, then Colonel of the 20th Kansas, 
and Major Metcalf, of the same regiment. These last 
two also made a most vigorous general denial, and 
nothing whatever was established against them. The 
whole matter was finally disposed of by being forwarded 
to the War Department at Washington by General 
Otis on July 13, 1899, some six months after the occur- 
rences alleged, with the remark that he (General Otis) 
"doubted the wisdom of a court-martial" of the soldier 
who had made the charge against Major Bishop, "as 
it would give the insurgent authorities a knowledge of 
what was taking place, and they would assert positively 
that our troops practised inhumanities, whether the 

1 Senate Document 331, pp. 1890 et seq. 2 lb., p. 1436. 



Otis and the War 201 

charges could be proven or not" and that they would 
use the incident "asan excuse to defend their own bar- 
barities." 1 The last endorsement on the papers pre- 
ceding General Otis' s final endorsement was one by 
Colonel Crowder, now (1912) Judge Advocate General 
of the United States Army, in which he said : " I am not 
convinced from a careful reading of this report, that 
Private Brenner has made a false charge against Captain 
Bishop"; adding that "considerations of public policy, 
sufficiently grave to silence every other demand, require 
that no further action be taken in this case." 2 The 
"considerations of public policy" were of course those 
indicated in General Otis' s final endorsement on the 
papers, already quoted. They were compellingly con- 
trolling, in my judgment, independently of the merits. 
Washing one's soiled linen in public is never advisable, 
and placing a weapon in your enemy's hand in time of 
war is at least equally unwise. Some shreds of this 
once much mooted matter doubtless still linger in the 
public memory. It has been thus briefly ventilated 
here solely to trace the genesis of the bitterness of that 
war, and of numerous later barbarities avenged in kind. 
The bitterness thus early begun grew as the war went 
on, until every time a hapless Filipino peasant soldier 
speaking only two or three words of Spanish would 
falsely explain, when captured, that he was a non-com- 
batant, an amigo (friend), it usually at once filled the 
captor with vivid recollections of slain comrades, and 
of rumored or sometimes proven mutilation of their 
bodies after death, and these reflections would at once 
fill him with a yearning desire to blow the top of the 
amigo' s head off, whether he yielded to the desire or 
not. Of no instance where he did so yield am I aware. 
But I do know that the invariable statement of all 

1 Senate Document jji f p. 1448. 2 lb., pt. 2, p. 1447. 



202 American Occupation of Philippines 

Filipinos unarmed and un-uniformed when captured, 
to the effect that they were amigos, became to the 
American soldier not remotely dissimilar to the waving 
of a red rag at a bull. Of course this was also due, 
largely, to the guerrilla practice of hiding guns when 
hard-pressed and actually plunging at once into some 
make-believe agricultural pursuit. As for Major 
Bishop, it is inconceivable to me that he gave any order 
to kill unarmed prisoners. Even admitting for the 
sake of the argument that he is a fiend, he is not a fool. 
As a matter of fact, he was a brave soldier, as all the 
reports show, and is a reputable lawyer, having many 
w^arm friends whose opinion of any man would com- 
mand respect anywhere. The truth of the whole mat- 
ter probably is that just before going into battle, when 
our troops were in an ugly temper by reason of the 
rumors of barbarities alleged to have been perpetrated 
by the enemy, or contemplated by him, the word was 
passed along the line to "Take no more prisoners than 
we have to," and that that thought originated with 
some irresponsible private soldier of the line inflamed 
by stories of mutilation of our dead or of maltreatment 
of our wounded. Such a "word," so passed from man 
to man, can, in the heat of conflict, very soon evolve 
into something having for practical purposes all the 
force and effect of an order. 

Through the foregoing, and like causes, including 
the "water cure," later invented to persuade amigos 
to discover the whereabouts of hidden insurgent guns 
or give information as to the movements of the enemy, 1 

1 The "water cure" (a cure for reticence) consisted in placing a bam- 
boo reed in the victim's mouth and pouring water down his throat thus 
painfully distending his stomach and crowding all his viscera. Allowed 
to void this after a time, he would, under threat of repetition, give the 
desired information. 



Otis and the War 203 

our war with the Filipinos became, before it was over, 
a rather "dark and bloody" affair, accentuated as it 
was, from time to time, by occasional Filipino success 
in surprising detachments from ambush, or by taking 
them unawares and off their guard in their quarters, 
and eliminating them, the most notable instance of the 
first being the crumpling of a large command of the 
15th Infantry by General Juan Cailles, in southern 
Luzon, and the most indelibly remembered and impor- 
tant example of the second being the massacre of the 
9th Infantry people at Balangiga, in Samar, in the 
fall of 1 90 1. Certainly more than one American in 
that long-drawn-out war did things unworthy of any 
civilized man, things he would have believed it impos- 
sible, before he went out there, ever to come to. Per- 
sonally, I have heard, so far as I now recollect, of 
comparatively few barbarities perpetrated by Filipinos 
on captured American soldiers. Barbarities on their 
side seemed to have been reserved for those of their own 
race whom they found disloyal to the cause of their 
country. Personally I have never seen the water-cure 
administered. But I once went on a confidential mis- 
sion by direction of General MacArthur, in the course 
of which I reported first, on arriving in the neighbor- 
hood of the contemplated destination, to a general 
officer of the regular army who is still such to-day. 1 
That night the general was good enough to extend the 
usual courtesy of a cot to sleep on, in the headquarters 
building. Toward dusk I went to dine with a certain 
lieutenant, also of the regular army. 2 As we approached 

1 Since the above was written, the officer in question has joined the 
Great Majority. It was that fearless, faithful, and kindly man, General 
Fred. D. Grant, who died in April, 1912. 

2 The lieutenant is no longer in the army, but he resigned voluntarily 
long after the incident related in the text, and for reasons wholly foreign 
to said incident. 



204 American Occupation of Philippines 

the lieutenant's quarters a sergeant came up with a 
prisoner, and asked instructions as to what to do with 
him. The lieutenant said : " Take him out and find out 
what he knows. Do you understand, Sergeant?" The 
sergeant saluted, answered in the affirmative, and 
moved away with his prisoner. We went in to the 
lieutenant's quarters, and while at dinner heard groans 
outside. I said "What is that, Jones?" 1 Jones 
said: "That 's the water-cure he 's giving that hombre. 2 
Want to see it?" I replied that I certainly did not. 
Returning that night to the general's headquarters, 
after breakfast the next morning I met my friend 
Jones coming out of the general's office. I said: 
"What's the matter, what are you doing here," he 
having mentioned the evening before an expedition 
planned for the morrow. He said: "Well, I 've just 
had a talk with the general to see if I could get my 
resignation from the army accepted?" "Why?" said 

I. "Well," was the reply, "that " (designating 

the prisoner of the night before by a double barrelled 
epithet) "died on me last night." Just how the 
matter was hushed up I have never known, but 
Jones was never punished. More than one general 
officer of the United States Army in the Philippines 
during our war with the Filipinos at least winked at the 
water-cure as a means of getting information, and quite 
a number of subalterns made a custom of applying it 
for that purpose. It was practically the only way you 
could get them to betray their countrymen. Did I 
report the incident to General MacArthur? Certainly 
not. It was the business of the general commanding 
the district. The water-cure, though very painful, 
was seldom fatal, and when not fatal was almost never 

1 Of course my host's name was not Jones, but Jones will do. 

2 Spanish for man. 



Otis and the War 205 

permanently damaging, and it was about the only 
way to shake the loyalty of the average Filipino and 
make him give information as to hidden insurgent 
guns, guerrilla bands, etc. It was a part of Benevolent 
Assimilation. 

Let us now return to the early battlefields about 
Manila which we left, initially, to analyze the extreme 
bitterness of the feeling between the combatants that 
very early began to develop. 

We left war correspondent John F. Bass among the 
dead and dying on one of these fields, supposedly mus- 
ing on the White Man's Burden, or Land-Grabbing, or 
Tr us t-f or- Civilization theory, or whatever it was that 
moved the fifty-seven senators whose votes had ratified 
the treaty by a majority of just one more than the con- 
stitutionally necessary two-thirds. 

The reason the writer lays so much stress on Mr. 
Bass's letters to Harper's Weekly on the early fighting 
in the Philippines, is because his remarks come direct 
from the battlefield, and are, as it were, res gestce. They 
were made dum fervet opus, to use a law Latin phrase 
which in plain English means "while the iron is hot." 
They reflect more or less accurately the feelings of the 
men whose deeds he was recording. He, and O. K. 
Davis, now Washington correspondent of the New York 
Times, and John T. McCutcheon, of Chicago, the now 
famous cartoonist (who was with Dewey in the battle 
of Manila Bay), and Robert Collins, now London 
correspondent of the Associated Press, and "Dick" 
Little of the Chicago Tribune, — a little man about six 
feet three, — and lots of other good men and true, were 
all through that fighting, and we will later come to an 
issue of personal veracity between them and General 
Otis which culminated in the retirement from office of 
Secretary of War Alger, and ought to have resulted in 



206 American Occupation of Philippines 

the recall of General Otis, but did not, because to have 
acknowledged what a blunderer General Otis had been 
and to have relieved him from command, as he should 
have been relieved, would have been to "swap horses 
crossing a stream," as Mr. Lincoln used to put it in 
declining to change generals during a given campaign. 
The object here is to bring out the truth of history as to 
how the men who bore the brunt of the early fighting 
felt about it. Testimony as to what the officers and 
men of the army said would be of no value, because a 
complaining soldier's complaints are too often only a 
proof of "cold feet." 1 

These newspaper men, not under military orders, were 
daily risking their lives voluntarily, just to keep the 
American public informed, and the American public 
were kept in darkness and only vouchsafed bulletins giv- 
ing them the progressive lists of their dead and wounded, 
and this last only on demand made upon Secretary 
Alger by the people of Minnesota, the Dakotas, etc., 
through their senators. The War Department did not 
want the people to know, did not want to admit itself, 
how plucky, vigorous, and patriotic the resistance was. 
The period of the fighting done by the State Volunteers 
from February until fall, when public opinion finally 
forced the Administration to send General Otis an 
adequate force, is slurred by Secretary of War Root in 
his report for 1899. I do not mean that it was slurred 
intentionally. But the Philippines were a long way 
off, and Mr. Root and Mr. McKinley naturally relied 
for their information on their commanding general 
on the spot. There were gallant deeds done in the 
Philippines by those Western fellows of the State 
regiments which volunteered for the war with Spain, 

1 A Philippine campaign expression for losing one's nerve and wanting 
to quit. 



Otis and the War 207 

that would have made the little fighting around Santi- 
ago look like — well, to borrow from "Chimmie" Fad- 
den's fertile vocabulary, "like 30 cents." But General 
Otis was not in a position to get the thrill of such things 
from his office window, so very few of them were given 
much prominence by him in his despatches to the 
Adjutant-General of the army. This was wise enough 
from a political standpoint, seeing that a presidential 
campaign was to ensue in 1900 predicated on the pro- 
position that American sovereignty was "in accord 
with the wishes and aspirations of the great mass of the 
Filipinos," to use the words of the President's message 
to Congress of December, 1899. 

Caloocan was taken by General MacArthur on 
February 10th. The natural line of advance thereafter 
was of course up the railroad, because the insurgents 
held it, and needed it as much as we would. Through- 
out February there were engagements too numerous 
to mention. The navy also entertained the enemy 
whenever he came too near the shores of Manila Bay. 
One incident in particular is worthy of note, and worthy 
of the best traditions of the navy. I refer to the conduct 
of Assistant Engineer Emory Winship off Malabon, 
March 4, 1899. Malabon is five miles north of Manila, 
on the bay, not far from Caloocan. On the day named, a 
landing party of 125 men from the U. S. S. Bennington 
went ashore near Malabon to make photographs, in 
aid of navy gunnery, of certain entrenchments and 
buildings that had been struck by shells from the 
Monadnock. They foolishly failed to throw out scouts 
ahead of their column, and were suddenly greeted with 
a withering fire from a whole regiment of insurgents 
who had seen them first and lain in wait for them. 
They retired with considerably more haste than they 
had gone forth. The insurgents advanced, firing, at 



208 American Occupation of Philippines 

double quick, toward the comparative handful of 
Americans, and would undoubtedly have killed the 
last man jack of them, but Engineer Winship, who 
had been left in charge of the tug that brought the 
landing party shoreward, to keep up steam, saw the 
situation and promptly met it. He unlimbered a 
2,7mm. Hotchkiss revolving machine gun which stood 
in the bow of the tug, and opened up with accurate 
aim on the advancing regiment of Filipinos. Naturally 
he at once became a more important target than the 
retreating body. Nevertheless, he kept pumping lead 
into that long howling murderous advancing brown 
line until, when within two hundred yards of where the 
tug lay, the line recoiled and retreated, and the landing 
party got safely back to the ship. It was, literally, a 
case of saving the lives of more than a hundred men, 
by fearless promptness and dogged tenacity in the 
intelligent and skilful performance of duty. The 
awnings of the tug were torn in shreds by the enemy's 
rain of bullets, and her woodwork was much peppered. 
Winship was hit five times, and still carries the 
bullets in his body, having been retired on account of 
disability resulting therefrom, after being promoted in 
recognition of his work. 

Soon after March 25th, General MacArthur, com- 
manding the Second Division of the Eighth Army 
Corps, advanced from Caloocan up the railroad to 
Malolos, the insurgent capital, some twenty miles 
away. Malolos was taken March 31st. Our February 
killed were six officers and seventy-one enlisted men, 
total seventy-seven, and a total of 378 wounded. By 
the end of March the list swelled to twelve officers and 
127 enlisted men killed, total 139, and a total of 881 
wounded, making our total casualities, as reported 
April 1st, 1020. Also 15% of the command, or about 



Otis and the War 209 

2500, were on sick report on that date from heat 
prostrations and the like. 1 For these and other 
reasons, farther advance up the railroad was halted 
for a while. 

Meantime, General Lawton, with his staff, consisting 
of Colonel Edwards, Major Starr, and Captains King 
and Sewall, "the big four" they were called, had come 
out from New York City by way of the Suez Canal, 
bringing most welcome reinforcements, the 4th and 
17th Infantry. These people arrived between the 
10th and the 226. of March. What happened soon 
after, as a result of their arrival, must now become 
for a brief moment, a part of the panorama, the lay 
of the land General Lawton first swept over being 
first indicated. 

Luzon is practically bisected, east and west, by the 
Pasig River and a lake out of which it flows almost due 
west into Manila Bay, Manila being at the mouth of 
the river. Under the Spaniards, all Luzon north of 
the Pasig had been one military district and all Luzon 
south of the Pasig another. The Eighth Army Corps 
always spoke of northern Luzon as "the north line," 
and of southern Luzon as "the south line." The 
lake above mentioned is called the Laguna de Bay. 
It is nearly as big as Manila Bay, which last is called 
twenty odd miles wide by thirty long. On the map, 
the Laguna de Bay roughly resembles a half-moon, the 
man in which looks north, the western horn being near 
Manila, and the eastern near the Pacific coast of Luzon. 
General Otis had learned that at a place called Santa 
Cruz, toward the eastern end of the Laguna de Bay, 
there were a lot of steam launches and a Spanish gun- 
boat, which, if captured, would prove invaluable for 
river fighting and transportation of supplies along the 

1 Otis's Report, p. 133. 
14 



210 American Occupation of Philippines 

Rio Grande de Pampanga and the other streams that 
watered the great central plain through which the rail- 
road ran and which would have to be occupied later. 
So as soon as possible after General Lawton arrived and 
the necessary men could be spared, he was sent with 
1500 troops to seize and bring back the boats in 
question. Of course the country he should overrun 
would have to be overrun again, because there were not 
troops enough to spare to garrison and hold it. But for 
the present, the launches would help. This expedition 
was successful, leaving the head of the lake nearest 
Manila on April 9th, and returning April 17th. It met 
with some good hard fighting on the way, sweeping 
everything before it of course, inflicting considerable 
loss, and suffering some. General Lawton's report 
mentions, among other officers whose conspicuous 
gallantry and efficiency in action attracted his atten- 
tion, Colonel Clarence R. Edwards, now Chief of the 
Bureau of Insular Affairs of the War Department, 
of whose conduct in the capture of Santa Cruz on the 
morning of April 10th, he says: "No line of battle 
could have been more courageously or intelligently 
led." 1 The resistance was pretty real to Colonel 
Edwards then, i.e., the Benevolent Assimilation was 
quite strenuous, and it continued to be so until his 
great commander was shot through the breast in the 
forefront of battle in the hour of victory in December 
thereafter, and the colonel came home with the 
general's body. Since then the colonel has soldiered 
no more, but has remained on duty at Washington, the 
birthplace of the original theory that the Filipinos 
welcomed our rule, charged with the duty of yearning 

1 War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 35. In this handsome 
commendation General Lawton also included Maj. Charles G. Starr, 
one of the best all-round soldiers I ever knew. 



\ 



Otis and the War 211 

over the erring Filipino who thinks he can govern him- 
self but is mistaken, and also with the still more difficult 
task of trying to live up to the original theory as far 
as circumstances will permit. As a matter of fact, the 
Filipinos would probably have gotten along much 
better than the Cubans if we had let General Lawton 
do there what he and General Wood were set to work 
doing in Cuba shortly after Santiago fell. Public 
opinion is a very dangerous thing to trifle with, and 
when, in September, 1899, there was a story going the 
rounds of the American newspapers that Lawton, the 
hero of El Caney, the man who had reflected more 
glory on American arms in striking the shackles of 
Spain from Cuba than any other one soldier in the army, 
had called the war in the Philippines "this accursed 
war," the War Department got busy over the cable 
to General Otis and obtained from him a denial that 
General Lawton had made such a remark. But the 
public knew its Lawton and what he had done in Cuba, 
and had a suspicion there might be some truth in the 
rumor. So the War Department cabled out saying 
"Newspapers say Lawton's denial insufficient," and 
then repeating the words attributed to him. So 
General Otis sent another denial that filled the bill. x Of 
course General Lawton made no such remark. He was 
too good a soldier. It would have demoralized his 
whole command. But I served under him in both 
hemispheres, and I will always believe that he had a 
certain amount of regret at having to fight the Filipinos 
to keep them from having independence, when they 
were a so much likelier lot, take it all in all, than the 
Cubans we saw about Santiago. Moreover, I believe 
that had it not been then too late to ask him, he would 

1 See Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., pp. 
1068 et seq. ' 



212 American Occupation of Philippines 

have subscribed to the opinion Admiral Dewey had 
cabled home the previous summer: " These people are 
far superior in their intelligence and more capable of 
self-government than the natives of Cuba, and I am 
familiar with both races." 

After the expedition down the lake, General Lawton 
went on "The North Line." So let us now turn 
thither also. For wherever Lawton was, there was 
fighting. 

In the latter half of April, General MacArthur 
advanced north along the railroad, and took Calumpit, 
where the railroad crosses the Rio Grande, on April 
28th. This was the place where under cover of "the 
accurate concentrated fire of the guns of the Utah 
Light Artillery commanded by Major Young" 1 a 
few Kansas men with ropes tied to their bodies 
swam the river in the face of a heavy fire from the 
enemy, fastened the ropes to some boats on the 
enemy's side, and were pulled back in the boats, 
by their comrades, to the side they had come from; 
the Kansans then crossing the river under the lead 
of the gallant Funston, and driving the enemy from 
his trenches. The desperate bravery of the perform- 
ance, like so many other things General Funston did 
in the Philippines, was so superb that one forgets 
how contrary it was to all known rules of the game 
of war. If it was Providence that saved Funston 
and his Kansans from annihilation, certainly Provi- 
dence was ably assisted on that occasion by Major 
Young and his Utah Battery. 2 

Shortly after this General MacArthur entered San 

1 Otis's Report, p. 115. 

2 An interesting account of this experience is given by General Funs- 
ton himself in the October, 191 1, number of Scribner's Magazine, in an 
article entitled " From Malolos to San Fernando." 



Otis and the War 213 

Fernando, the second insurgent capital, which is 
forty miles or so up the railroad from Manila. 

During the month of May General Lawton kept the 
insurgents busy to the east of the railroad, between it 
and the Pacific coast range, taking San Isidro, whither 
the third insurgent capital was moved after Malolos 
fell, on May 17th. Here he made his headquarters for 
a time, as did General MacArthur at San Fernando. 

It had been supposed that practically the whole 
body of the insurgent army was concentrated in the 
country to the north of Manila, but this proved 
a mistake. They now began to threaten Manila 
from the country south of the Pasig. Says General 
Otis: 

The enemy had become again boldly demonstrative at 
the South and it became necessary to throw him back once 
more. * 

General Lawton was directed to concentrate his 
troops in the country about San Isidro, turn them over 
to the command of some one else, and come to Manila 
to organize for a campaign on the south line. The 
details of this expedition belong to a military history, 
which this is not. The expedition left its initial point 
of concentration near Manila on June 9th. Its great 
event was the battle of Zapote River on June 13th. 
Along this river in 1896 the insurgents had gained a great 
victory over the Spaniards. They had trenches on the 
farther side of the river which they deemed impregnable. 
General Lawton attacked them in these intrenchments 
June 13th. At three o'clock that afternoon he wired 
General Otis at Manila giving him an idea of the battle 
and stating that the enemy was fighting in strong force 
and with determination. At 3:30 o'clock he wired: 

1 Otis's Rbport, p. 136. 



214 American Occupation of Philippines 

We are having a beautiful battle. Hurry up ammunition; 
we will need it; 

and at 4 o'clock: 

We have the bridge. It has cost us dearly. Battle not 
yet over. It is a battle however. J 

It was in this battle of Zapote River that Lieutenant 
William L. Kenly, of the regular artillery, did what was 
perhaps the finest single bit of soldier work of the whole 
war, 2 in recognition of which his conduct in the battle 
was characterized as " magnificent " by so thorough a 
soldier as General Lawton, who recommended him to 
be brevetted for distinguished gallantry in the presence 
of the enemy, with this remark: 

As General Ovenshine says, speaking of Lieutenant Kenly 
and his battery, ' ' This is probably the first time in history 
that a battery has been advanced and fought without cove? 
within thirty yards of strongly manned trenches." 3 

For what he did on that occasion, Kenly ought to 
have had a medal of honor, which, except life insurance 
and a good education, is the finest legacy any govern- 
ment can enable a soldier to bequeath to his children. 
If the war had been backed by the sentiment of the 
whole country, as the Spanish War was, he would have 
gotten it. As it was, the only thing he ever got for it, 
so far as the writer is advised, was to have his name spelt 
wrong in an account of the incident in the only book 

1 War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 138. 

2 Except, of course, the capture of Aguinaldo by General Funston 
nearly two years later. 

3 See General Lawton's Report on the Zapote River fight, War 
Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 282. 



Otis and the War 215 

wherein there has yet been attempted a record of the 
many deeds of splendid daring that marked the only 
war into which this nation ever blundered. l 

While there were divers and sundry movements of 
our troops hither and thither, and much sacrifice of 
life, after General Lawton's Zapote River campaign in 
June, no substantial progress was made in conquering 
and occupying the Islands until the fall following the 
Zapote River campaign above mentioned, when the 
twenty-five regiments of volunteers were organized 
and sent out. All that was done until then, after the 
capture of San Fernando, may be summed up broadly, 
by saying that we protected Manila and held the 
railroad, as far as we had fought our way up it. It 
is true that the city of Iloilo had been occupied on 
February nth, the city of Cebu shortly afterward, the 
island of Negros, an oasis of comparative quiet in a 
great desert of hostility, a little later ; also that a small 
Spanish garrison at the little port of Jolo in the Moham- 
medan country near Borneo had also been relieved by a 
small American force on the 19th of May. But these 
irresolute movements accomplished nothing except to 
deprive our force at the front of about 4000 men and 
to awaken the Visayan Islands to active and thorough 
organization against us. 

Preparatory to an understanding of the fall cam- 
paign, in which patchwork and piecemeal warfare 
was superseded by the real thing, it will now be neces- 
sary to consider the political — or let us call it, the 
politico-military — aspect of the first half year of the 
war. 

General Otis's folly had led him to advise Washington 
as early as November, 1898, that he could get along with 

1 See Harper's History of the War in the Philippines, p. 214, where the 
name of the gentleman is spelled "Kanly." 



216 American Occupation of Philippines 

25,000 troops, l and the Otis under-estimate of the resis- 
tance we would meet if we took the Islands had un- 
doubtedly influenced Mr. McKinley in deciding to 
take them. Twenty-five thousand troops was only 5000 
more than General Otis had with him at the time he 
made the recommendation, and signified that he was 
not expecting trouble. The Treaty of Paris was signed 
on December 10, 1898, and on December 16th, Presi- 
dent McKinley 's Secretary of War informed Congress 
that 25,000 troops would be enough for the Philippines. 2 
When the treaty was ratified February 6, 1899, the war 
in the Philippines had already broken out. On March 
2, 1899, two days before the 55th Congress expired r 
in fact on the very day that Congress appropriated 
the $20,000,000 to pay Spain for the Islands, an act 
was passed authorizing the President to enlist 35,000 
volunteers to put down the insurrection in the Islands. 
The term of enlistment of these volunteers was to 
expire June 30, 1901. As the New Thought people 
would say "Hold the Thought!" June 30, 1901, is 
the end of our government's fiscal year. That date, 
the date of expiration of the enlistment of the volun- 
teer army raised under the act of March 2, 1899, is a 
convenient key to the whole history of the American 
occupation of the Philippines since the outbreak of our 
war with the Filipinos, February 4, 1899, including the 
titanic efforts of the McKinley Administration in the 
latter half of 1899 an d the first half of 1900 to retrieve 
the Otis blunders ; the premature resumption by Judge 
Taft, during and in aid of Mr. McKinley 's campaign 
for the Presidency in 1900, of the original McKinley 
Benevolent Assimilation programme, on the theory, 

1 Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, Otis Despatches of 
November 27th, vol. ii., p. 846. 

2 House Document 85, 55th Cong., 3d Sess. 



V 



Otis and the War 217 

already wholly exploded by a long and bitter war, that 
the great majority of the people welcomed American 
rule and had only been coerced into opposing us; and 
the premature setting up of the Civil Government on 
July 4, 1 90 1. No candid mind seeking only the truth 
of history can fail to see that when President McKinley 
sent the Taft Commission to the Philippines in the 
spring of 1900, part of their problem was to facilitate 
Mr. McKinley in avoiding later on any further call 
for volunteers to take the place of those whose terms 
would expire June 30, 1901. The amount of force that 
has been needed to saddle our government firmly on 
the Filipino people is the only honest test by which to 
examine the claim that it is unto them as Castoria 
unto children. In February, 1899, the dogs of war being 
already let loose, President McKinley had resumed his 
now wholly impossible Benevolent Assimilation pro- 
gramme, by sending out the Schurman Commission, 
which was the prototype of the Taft Commission, to 
yearningly explain our intentions to the insurgents, 
and to make clear to them how unqualifiedly benevolent 
those intentions were. The scheme was like trying 
to put salt on a bird's tail after you have flushed him. 
This commission was headed by President Schurman, 
of Cornell University. It arrived in March, armed with 
instructions as benevolent in their rhetoric as any the 
Filipinos had ever read in the days of our predecessors 
in sovereignty, the Spaniards. And the commission 
were of course duly astounded that their publication 
had no effect. The Filipinos in Manila tore them down 
as soon as they were put up. The instructions clothed 
the commission with authority to yield every point in 
issue except the only one in dispute — Independence. 
On this alone they were firm. But so were the people 
who had already submitted the issue to the arbitrament 



2i 8 American Occupation of Philippines 

of war. Of course the Schurman Commission, therefore, 
accomplished nothing. It held frequent communica- 
tion with the enemy in the field and came near an open 
rupture with General Otis, who was nominally a member 
of it. But even that unwise man knew war when he 
saw it, and knew the futility of trying to mix peace with 
war. War being hell, the sooner 't is over the better 
for all concerned. After Professor Schurman had been 
quite optimistically explaining our intentions for about 
three months, under the tragically mistaken notion 
Mr. McKinley had originally derived from General 
Otis that the insurrection had been brought about by 
"the sinister ambition of a few leaders, ,,]C General Otis 
wired Washington, on June 4th, " Negotiations and 
conferences with insurgent leaders cost soldiers' lives 
and prolong our difficulties," 2 adding with regard to 
the Schurman Commission: ''Ostensibly it will be 
supported * * * here, and to the outside world gentle 
peace shall prevail," but intimating that he would be 
very much gratified if the Department would allow him 
to handle the enemy, and stop Dr. Schurman from 
having their leaders come in under flags of truce to 
parley. After that Dr. Schurman's activities seem to 
have been confined to the less mischievous business of 
gathering statistics. His mistake was simply the one 
he had brought with him, derived from President Mc- 
Kinley. He came back home, however, thoroughly 
satisfied that the Filipinos did of a verity want the 
independence they were fighting for, and quite as sure 
that republics should not have colonies as General 
Anderson's experience had previously made him. It 
has long been known throughout the length and breadth 

1 The words quoted are from President McKinley's message to Con- 
gress of December, 1899. 

2 Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1002. 



Otis and the War 219 

of the United States that Dr. Schurman is in favor of 
Philippine independence. 

On June 26th, just thirteen days after the Zapote 
River fight had stopped the insurgents on the south 
line from threatening almost the very gates of the city 
of Manila itself, General Otis had another attack of 
optimism. On that date he wired Washington: "In- 
surgent cause may collapse at any time." 1 Finally, 
the war correspondents at Manila, wearied with the 
military press censorship whereby General Otis had so 
long kept the situation from the people at home, with 
his eternal " situation- well-in-hand " telegrams, got 
together, inspired no doubt by the example of the 
Roosevelt round robin that had rescued the Fifth 
Army Corps from Cuba after the fighting down there, 
and prepared a round robin of their own — a protest 
against further misrepresentation of the facts. This 
they of course knew General Otis would not let them 
cable home. However, they asked his permission to 
do so, the committee appointed to beard the lion in his 
den being 0. K. Davis, John T. McCutcheon, Robert 
Collins, and John F. Bass. General Otis threatened 
to "put them off the island." This did not bother 
them in the least. General Otis told the War Depart- 
ment afterwards that he did not punish them because 
they were "courting martyrdom," or words to that 
effect. As a matter of fact, they were merely deter- 
mined that the American people should know the facts. 
That of "putting them off the island" was just a fussy 
phrase of " Mother" Otis, long familiar to them. They 
were under his jurisdiction. But they were Ameri- 
cans, and reputable gentlemen, and he knew he was 
responsible for their right treatment. After General 
Otis had duly put the expected veto on the proposed 

1 Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1020. 



220 American Occupation of Philippines 

cablegram of protest, the newspaper men sent their 
protest over to Hong Kong by mail, and had it cabled 
to the United States from there. It was published in 
the newspapers of this country July 17, 1899. A copy 
of it may be found in any public 1 brary which keeps 
the bound copies of the great magazines, in the Review 
of Reviews for August, 1899, pp. 137-8. It read as 
follows : 

The undersigned, being all staff correspondents of Ameri- 
can newspapers stationed in Manila, unite in the following 
statement : 

We believe that, owing to official despatches from Manila 
made public in Washington, the people of the United States 
have not received a correct impression of the situation in 
the Philippines, but that those despatches have presented 
an ultra-optimistic view that is not shared by the general 
officers in the field. 

We believe the despatches incorrectly represent the exist- 
ing conditions among the Filipinos in respect to internal 
dissension and demoralization resulting from the American 
campaign and to the brigand character of their army. 

We believe the despatches err in the declaration that 
"the situation is well in hand," and in the assumption that 
the insurrection can be speedily ended without a greatly 
increased force. 

We think the tenacity of the Filipino purpose has been 
under-estimated, and that the statements are unfounded 
that volunteers are willing to engage in further service. 

The censorship has compelled us to participate in this 
misrepresentation by excising or altering uncontroverted 
statements of facts on the plea that "they would alarm the 
people at home," or "have the people of the United States 
by the ears." 

The men of the pen had been so long under military 
rule and had seen so much of courts-martial that their 



Otis and the War 221 

document savored of military jurisprudence. After 
making the above charges, it set forth what it called 
1 ' specifications . ' ' These were : 

Prohibition of hospital reports; suppression of full reports 
of field operations in the event of failure; numbers of heat 
prostrations in the field; systematic minimization of naval 
operations; and suppression of complete reports of the 
situation. 

The paper was signed by John T. McCutcheon and 
Harry Armstrong, representing the Chicago Record; 
O. K. Davis and P. G. MacDonnell, representing the 
New York Sun; Robert M. Collins, John P. Dunning, 
and L. Jones, representing the Associated Press ; John 
F. Bass and William Dinwiddie, representing the New 
York Herald; E. D. Skeene, representing the Seripps- 
McRae Association; and Richard Little, representing 
the Chicago Tribune. Mr. Collins, the Associated Press 
representative, wrote his people an account of this 
whole episode, which was also given wide publicity. 
After describing the committee's interview with the 
General down to a certain point, he says : 

But when General Otis came down to the frank admission 
that it was his purpose to keep the knowledge of conditions 
here from the public at home, and when the censor had 
repeatedly told us, in ruling out plain statements of undis- 
puted facts, "My instructions are to let nothing go that can 
hurt the Administration," we concluded that protest was 
justifiable. 

Collins had written what he considered a conserva- 
tive review of the situation in June, saying reinforce- 
ments were needed. Of the suppression of this he says : 

The censor's comment (I made a note of it) was: "Of 
course we all know that we are in a terrible mess out here, 



222 American Occupation of Philippines 

but we don't want the people to get excited about it. If 
you fellows will only keep quiet now we will pull through 
in time 1 without any fuss at home!" 

Mr. Collins 's letter proceeds: "When I went to see 
him [Otis] he repeated the same old story about the 
insurrection going to pieces." 

As to the charge of suppressing the real condition of 
our sick in the hospitals, Mr. Collins says that General 
Otis remarked that the "hospitals were full of per- 
fectly well men who were shirking and should be turned 
out." On June 2, 1899, according to General Otis's 
report (p. 121), sixty per cent, of one of the State volun- 
teer regiments were in hospital sick or wounded and 
there were in its ranks an average of but eight men to a 
company fit for duty. The report of the regimental 
surgeon stating this was forwarded by General Otis to 
Washington with the comment that there were few 
cases of serious illness; that the then "present station 
of these troops" — the place where the fighting was hot- 
test, San Fernando — "is considered by the Filipinos 
as a health resort," and that "when orders to take 
passage to the United States are issued, both the 
Montana and South Dakota troops will recover with 
astonishing rapidity. ' ' 2 

This round robin of course produced a profound 
sensation in the United States. It was just what the 
American public had long suspected was the case. 
Shortly afterward Secretary of War Alger resigned. 
Coming as it did on the heels of the scandal about 
"embalmed beef" having been furnished to the army 

1 Meaning, of course, in time not to embarrass President McKinley's 
prospective candidacy for re-election in 1900, in a campaign in which all 
knew the acquisition of the Philippines was sure to be the paramount 
issue. 

2 War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. L, part 4, p. 122. 



Otis and the War 223 

in Cuba, it made him too much of a load for the Admini- 
stration to carry. He was succeeded by Mr. Root, 
an eminent member of the New York Bar, whose master- 
ful mind soon saw the essentials of the situation and 
proceeded to get a volunteer army recruited, equipped, 
and sent to the Philippines without further unnecessary 
delay. 



CHAPTER XII 
Otis and the War {Continued) 

And now, a man of head being at the centre of it, the whole matter 
gets vital. — Carlyle's French Revolution. 

THERE can surely be little doubt in any quarter 
that Mr. Root is, in intellectual endowment 
and equipment at least, one of the greatest, if he is not 
the greatest, of living American statesmen. Mankind 
will always yield due acclaim to men who, in great 
emergencies, see the essentials of a given situation, and 
at once proceed to get the thing done that ought to be 
done. Whether the war in the Philippines was regret- 
table or not, it had become, by midsummer of 1899, 
supremely important, from any rational and patriotic 
standpoint, to end it as soon as possible. 

Mr. Root had not been in office as Secretary of War 
very long before fleets of troop-ships, carrying some 
twenty-five well-equipped volunteer regiments, 1 were 

1 Strictly speaking, only twenty-three regiments were sent out from the 
United States. Under the Act of March 2, 1899, providing the volunteer 
army of 35,000 men for the Philippines, twenty -four regiments of infan- 
try and one of cavalry were organized. The infantry regiments were 
numbered Twenty-six to Forty-nine, both inclusive, the numbering 
taking up where the numbering of the regular infantry regiments then 
ended, with the Twenty-fifth. The cavalry regiment was called the 
Eleventh Cavalry, the regular cavalry regimental enumeration ending 
at that time with the Tenth. The Eleventh Cavalry and the Thirty- 
sixth Infantry were organized, officered, and largely recruited from men 

224 



Otis and the War 225 

swarming out of New York harbor bound for Manila by 
way of the Suez Canal, and out of the Golden Gate for 
the same destination via Honolulu. Nor was there any 
confusion as in the Cuban helter-skelter. Everything 
went as if by clockwork. Moreover, along with the new 
.and ample force, went a clear, masterly, compre- 
hensive plan of campaign, prepared, not by General 
Otis at Manila, but in the War Department at 
Washington, by officers already familiar with the 
islands. 

It was the purpose of this government at last to 
demonstrate conclusively to the Filipino people that 
the representative of the United States at Manila was 
"the boss of the show, " and that Aguinaldo was not — 
a demonstration then sorely needed by the exigencies of 
American prestige. The purpose can readily be appre- 
ciated, but to understand the plan of campaign, and 
the method of its execution, somewhat of the geography 
of Luzon must now be considered. Before we approach 
the shores of Luzon and the city of Manila, however, 
let us consider from a distance, in a bird's-eye view, as 
it were, the relation of Luzon to the rest of the archi- 
pelago, so as to know, in a comprehensive way, what 
we are "going out for to see. " We may as well pause 
at this point, long enough to learn all we will ever need 
to know, for the purposes of the scope of this narrative, 
concerning the general geography of the Philippine 
archipelago, and the governmental problems it 
presents. {See folding map at end of volume.) 

It is a common saying that Paris is France. In the 
same sense Manila is the Philippines. In fact, the 
latter expression is more accurate than the former, for 
Manila, besides being the capital city of the country, 

of the State Volunteers sent out in '98, who, in consideration of liberal 
inducements offered by the Government, consented to remain. 
is 



226 American Occupation of Philippines 

and its chief port, is a city of over 200,000 people, 
while no one of the two or three cities next to it in 
rank in population had more than 20,000. l By parity 
of reasoning it may be said that Luzon was the Philip- 
pines, so far as the problem which confronted us when 
we went there was concerned, relatively both to the 
original conception in 1898 of the struggle for indepen- 
dence, its birth in 1899, its life, and its slow, lingering 
obstinate death in 1 900-1 902, in which last year the 
insurrection was finally correctly stated to be practi- 
cally ended. To know just how and why this was 
true, is necessary to a clear understanding of that 
struggle, including not only its genesis and its exo- 
dus, but also its gospels, its acts, its revelations, 
and the multitudinous subsequent commentaries 
thereon. 

The total land area of the Philippine archipelago, 
according to the American Census of 1903, is 115,000 
square miles. 2 The area of Luzon, the principal island, 
on which Manila is situated, is 41,000 square miles, 
and that of Mindanao, the only other large island, is 
36,000. 3 Between these two large islands, Luzon on the 
north, and Mindanao on the south, there are a number 
of smaller ones, but acquaintance with only six of these 
is essential to a clear understanding of the American 
occupation. Many Americans, too busy to have paid 

1 The population of the city of Manila according to the Philippine 
Census of 1903, vol. ii., p. 16; was 219, 928. The three next largest 
towns are: Laoag, in the province of Ilocos Norte, about 270 miles 
north of Manila, near the northwest corner of Luzon, population 19,699; 
Iloilo, capital of the island of Panay and chief city and port of the Visa- 
yan Islands, some 300 miles south of Manila, population 19,054; and 
Cebu, capital and chief port of the island of Cebu, a day's voyage from 
Iloilo, population 18,330. See Philippine Census of 1903, vol. ii., p. 38. 

2 115,026 is the exact figure. See Philippine Census, vol. i., p. 57. 

3 The exact figure for Luzon is 40,969, and that for Mindanao, 36,292. 
lb. 



Otis and the War 227 

much attention to the Philippine Islands, which are, 
and must ever remain, a thing wholly apart from 
American life, have a vague notion that there 
are several thousand of them. This is true, in a 
way. American energy has made, for the first 
time in their history, an actual count of them, 
" including everything which at high tide appeared 
as a separate island." 1 The work was done for 
our Census of 1903 by Mr. George R. Putnam, 
now head of the Lighthouse Board of the United 
States. Mr. Putnam, counted 3141 of them. 2 Of 
these, of course, many — many hundred perhaps — 
are merely rocks fit only for a resting place for 
birds. 2775, have an area of less than a square mile 
each, 262 have an area of between 1 and 10 square 
miles, 73 between 10 and 100 square miles, and 20 
between 100 and 1000 square miles. This accounts 
for, and may dismiss at once from consideration 3130 — 
all but 11. Most of these 3130 that are large enough 
to demand even so much as a single word here are 
poorly adapted to human habitation, being in most 
instances, without good harbors or other landing 
places, and usually covered either with dense jungle 
or inhospitable mountains, or both. Their total area 
is only about 8500 square miles, of the 115,500 
square miles of land in the archipelago. None of 
them have ever had any political significance, either 
in Spain's time, or our own, and therefore, the whole 
3130 may at once be eliminated from consideration, 
leaving 11 only requiring any special notice at all 
— the II largest islands. Of these, Luzon and 
Mindanao have already been mentioned. The re- 
maining 9, with their respective areas and popula- 
tions, are: 

1 Philippine Census, vol. i., p. 56. x Ibid. 



228 American Occupation of Philippines 



Island 


Area 1 in 
Square Miles 


Population 2 


PANAY 


4,611 


743,646 


NEGROS 


438i 


560,776 


CEBU 


1,762 


592,247 


BOHOL 


1,411 


243,148 


SAMAR 


5,031 


222,690 


LEYTE 


2,722* 


357,641 


Mindoro 


3351 


28,361 


Masbate 


1,236 


29,451 


Paragua 


4,027 4 


10,918 



Total 29,532 2,788,878 

The political or governmental problem being now 
reduced from 3 141 islands to eleven, the last three of 
the nine contained in the above table may also be 
eliminated as follows : (See map at end cf volume.) 

Paragua, the long narrow island seen at the extreme 
lower left of any map of the archipelago, extending north- 
east southwest at an angle of about 45 , is practically 
worthless, being fit for nothing much except a penal 
colony, for which purpose it is in fact now used. 

Masbate — easily located on the map at a glance, 
because the twelfth parallel of north latitude inter- 
sects the 124th meridian of longitude east of Greenwich 
in its southeast corner — though noted for cattle and 
other quadrupeds, is not essential to a clear understand- 
ing of the human problem in its broader governmental 
aspects. 

1 Table of Areas, Census, 1903, vol. i., p. 263. 

2 Table of Populations, ib., vol. ii., p. 126. 

3 Total of these six in large type 20,418 square miles, say roughly 
20,500. 

4 Total of these last three in smaller type 91 14 square miles. 




BIRD S- EYE VIEW OF THE PHILIPPINE ARCHIPELAGO, SHOWING THE PREPONDERATING IMPORTANCE 

OF LUZON. 

For greater details, see folding map at end of volume. 



Otis and the War 229 

Mindoro, the large island just south of the main bulk 
of Luzon, pierced by the 121st meridian of longitude 
east of Greenwich, is thick with densely wooded 
mountains and jungle over a large part of its area, has 
a reputation of being very unhealthy (malarious), is 
also very sparsely settled, and does not now, nor has it 
ever, cut any figure politically, as a disturbing factor. J 

Eliminating Paragua, Masbate, and Mindoro as not 
essential to a substanially correct general idea of the 
strategic and governmental problems presented by the 
Philippine Islands, we have left, besides Luzon and Min- 
danao, nothing but the half-dozen islands which appear 
in large type in the above table: Panay, Negros, Cebu, 
Bohol, Samar, Leyte, with a total area of 20,500 square 
miles. Add these to Luzon's 41,000 square miles and 
Mindanao's 36,000, and you have the Philippine archi- 
pelago as we are to consider it in this book, that is to say, 
two big islands with a half dozen little ones in between, 
the eight having a total area of 97,500 square miles, of 
which the two big islands represent nearly four-fifths. 

While the great Mohammedan island of Mindanao, 
near Borneo, with its 36,000 square miles 2 of area, 
requires that the Philippine archipelago be described 
as stretching over more than 1000 miles from north 
to south, still, inasmuch as Mindanao only contains 
about 500,000 people all told, 3 half of them semi- 
civilized, 4 the governmental problem it presents has 

1 There is a large sugar estate on Mindoro, supposed to contain over 
60,000 acres or, say, ninety odd square miles, which in 191 1 figured 
in a congressional investigation of certain charges against Professor 
Worcester, a member of the Philippine Commission, but this is wholly 
separate from the original problem of public order. 

2 The exact figure is 36,292. Philippine Census, vol. i., p. 263. 

3 499,634, Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 126. 

4 The semi-civilized Moros of Mindanao live mostly in the interior, 
and have a crude form of Mohammedanism. The civilized Christian 
Filipinos of Mindanao live mostly on the littoral. 



230 American Occupation of Philippines 

no more to do with the main problem of whether, if 
ever, we are to grant independence to the 7,000,000 
Christians of the other islands, than the questions that 
have to be passed on by our Commissioner of Indian 
Affairs have to do with the tariff. 

Mindanao's 36,000 square miles constitute nearly a 
third of the total area of the Philippine archipelago, 
and more than that fraction of the 97,500 square miles 
of territory to a consideration of which our attention 
is reduced by the process of elimination above indicated. 
Turning over Mindanao to those crudely Mohammedan, 
semi-civilized Moros would indeed be ''like granting 
self-government to an Apache reservation under some 
local chief," as Mr. Roosevelt, in the campaign of 
1900, ignorantly declared it would be to grant self- 
government to Luzon under Aguinaldo. l Furthermore, 
the Moros, so far as they can think, would prefer to owe 
allegiance to, and be entitled to recognition as subjects 
of, some great nation. 2 Again, because, the Filipinos 
have no moral right to control the Moros, and could 
not if they would, the latter being fierce fighters and 
bitterfy opposed to the thought of possible ultimate 
domination by the Filipinos, the most uncompromising 
advocate of the consent-of-the-governed principle has 

1 This was said in no mere speech. Speeches are often misquoted. 
It was a letter signed by the foremost man of this age, Mr. Roosevelt, 
written September 15, 1900, accepting the nomination for the Vice- 
Presidency. (See Proceedings of the Republican National Committee, 
1900, p. 86.) Yet it represented then one of the many current misappre- 
hensions about the Filipinos which moved this great nation to destroy a 
voung republic set up in a spirit of intelligent and generous emulation 
of our own. 

1 One of the sultans, or head-men, was believed in 1899, to have tried 
on his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca made before we took the 
Philippines, by some dickering at Singapore or near there in the Straits 
Settlements, to sell out for a consideration to Great Britain, so as to be 
under the protection and in the pay of British North Borneo. 



Otis and the War 231 

not a leg to stand on with regard to Mohammedan 
Mindanao. Hence I affirm that as to it, we have a 
distinct and separate problem, which cannot be solved 
in the lifetime of anybody now living. But it is a 
problem which need not in the least delay the advent of 
independence for the other fourteen-fifteenths of the 
inhabitants of the archipelago 1 — all Christians living 
on islands north of Mindanao. It is true that there are 
some Christian Filipinos on Mindanao, but in policing 
the Moros, our government would of course protect 
them from the Moros. If they did not like our govern- 
ment, they could move to such parts of the island 
as we might permit to be incorporated in an ultimate 
Philippine republic. Inasmuch as the 300,000 or so 
Moros of the Mohammedan island of Mindanao and 
the adjacent islets called Jolo (the "Sulu Archipelago, " 
so called, "reigned over" by the Sultan of comic 
opera fame) originally presented, as they will alwa}^s 
present, a distinct and separate problem, and never did 
have anything more to do with the Philippine insur- 
rection against us than their cousins and co-religionists 
over in nearby Borneo, the task which confronted Mr. 
Root in the fall of 1899, to wit, the suppression of the 
Philippine insurrection, meant, practically, the subju- 
gation of one big island, Luzon, containing half the 
population and one-third the total area of the archi- 
pelago, and six neighboring smaller ones, the Visayan 
Islands. 

And now let us concentrate our attention upon Luzon 
as Mr. Root no doubt did, with infinite pains, in the 
fall of 1899. Of the 7,600,000 people of the Philip- 

1 The fraction used is based on 500,000 (the population of Mindanao) , 
being that fraction of 7,500,000 (which last is, roughly speaking, the 
total population of the archipelago). The census figures being 499,634 
and 7,635,426 respectively, as heretofore stated. 



232 American Occupation of Philippines 

pines 1 almost exactly one-half, i.e., 3,800,000, 2 live on 
Luzon, and these are practically all civilized. 3 It so 
happens that the State of our Union which is nearer the 
size of Luzon than any other is the one which furnished 
the first American Civil Governor for the Philippine 
Islands, Governor Taft. President Taft's native State 
of Ohio is 41,061 square miles in area, and Luzon is 
40,969. 4 Roughly speaking, Luzon may also be said to 
be about the size of Cuba, 5 though it is about twice as 
thickly populated as the latter, Cuba, having something 
over 2,000,000 people to Luzon's nearly 4,000,000. & 
By all Americans in the Philippines since our occu- 
pation, the island of Luzon is always contemplated as 
consisting of two parts, to wit, northern Luzon, or 
that part north of Manila, and southern Luzon, the 
part south of Manila. The great central plain of 
Luzon, lying just north of Manila, is nearly as large as 
the republic of Salvador, or the State of New Jersey, 
i.e., in the neighborhood of 7000 square miles area 7 
— and, like Salvador, it contains a population of 
something over 1,000,000 inhabitants. The area and 

1 7*635,426. Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 15. 

2 3,798,507. Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 125. 

3 223,506 is the total of the uncivilized tribes still extant in Luzon, 
Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 125, but they live in the mountains and 
you might live in the Philippines a long lifetime without ever seeing a 
sample of them, unless you happen to be an energetic ethnologist fond of 
mountain climbing. 

4 Philippine Census of IQ03, vol. i., p. 57. 

s The area of Cuba is about 44,000 square miles. 

6 Except Ohio, the States of Pennsylvania and Tennessee are nearer 
the size of Luzon than any others of the Union, the former containing 
about 45,000 square miles and the latter about 42,000. 

7 This comparison does not pretend to be mathematically exact. 
New Jersey's area is nearer 8000 than 7000 square miles. For further 
illustration by comparison, it may be noted in this connection that the 
area of Massachusetts is over 8000 square miles (8315) and that of 
Vermont between 9000 and 10,000 (9565). As Costa Rica has only 



Outline Sketch 

of the 
THEATRE OF OPERATIONS 




OUTLINE SKETCH OF THE THEATRE OF OPERATIONS IN LUZON, 



Otis and the War 233 

population of the five provinces of this plain are, 
according to the Philippine Census of 1903, as follows: 



Province 


Area 1 (sq. m.) 


Population 2 


Pangasinan 


1,193 


397,902 


Pampanga 


868 


223,754 


Bulacan 


i,i73 


223,742 


Tarlac 


1,205 


135,107 


Nueva Ecija 


i,950 


I34,H7 



6,389 1,114,652 

Roughly speaking, the central plain comprising the 
above five provinces is bounded as follows: On the 
north by mountains and Lingayen Gulf, on the east by a 
coast range of mountains separating it from the Pacific 
Ocean, on the west by a similar range separating it 
from the China Sea, and on the south by Manila Bay 
and mountains. The Rio Grande de Pampanga flows 
obliquely across it in a southwesterly direction into 
Manila Bay, and near its western edge runs the rail- 
road from Manila to Dagupan on Lingayen gulf. 
Dagupan is 120 miles from Manila. This plain, held 
by a well-equipped insurgent army backed by the moral 
support of the whole population, became the theatre of 
war as soon as the volunteers of 1899 began to arrive 
at Manila, the insurgent capital being then at Tarlac, 
a place about two-thirds of the way up the railroad from 
Manila to Dagupan. 

Of course the first essential thing to do was to break 

368,780 inhabitants {Statesman's Year Book), the province of Pan- 
gasinan alone contains more people than the republic of Costa Rica. 
The average of intelligence and industry of the masses in both is doubt- 
less about the same, with the probabilities in favor of Pangasinan. 

1 Table of Areas, Philippine Census of iqoj, vol. i., p. 58. 

a Table of Populations, ib. t vol. ii., p. 123. 



234 American Occupation of Philippines 

the backbone of the insurgent army, and scatter it, 
and the next thing to do was to capture Aguinaldo, the 
head and front of the whole business, the incarnation 
of the aspirations of the Filipino people. The opera- 
tions to this end commenced in October, and involved 
three movements of three separate forces: 

(i) A column, under General Lawton, proceeding 
up the Rio Grande and along the northeastern borders 
of the plain, and bending around westward along its 
northern boundary toward the gulf of Lingayen, garri- 
soning the towns en route, and occupying the mountain 
passes on the northeast which give exit over the divide 
into the great valleys beyond. 

(2) An expedition under General Wheat on, some 
2500 in all, proceeding by transports to the gulf of 
Lingayen, the chief port of which, Dagupan, was the 
northern terminus of the railroad; the objective being 
to land on the shore of that gulf at the northwest corner 
of the plain, occupy the great coast road which runs 
from that point to the northern extremity of the island, 
and also to proceed eastward and effect a junction with 
the Lawton column. 

(3) A third column under General MacArthur, 
proceeding up the railroad to the capture of Tarlac, 
the third insurgent capital, and thence still up the 
railroad to its end at Dagupan, driving the enemy's 
forces before it toward the line held by the first two 
columns. 

On October 12th, General Lawton moved up the 
Rio Grande from a place called Aryat, a few miles up 
stream from where the railroad crosses the river at 
Calumpit, driving the insurgents before him to the 
northward and westward. His command was made up 
mainly from the 3d Cavalry and the 22d Infantry, 
together with several hundred scouts, American and 



Otis and the War 235 

Maccabebee. On the 20th San Isidro was again 
captured. That was the place Lawton had evacuated 
in May previous. Arriving in the Islands with Colo- 
nel E. E. Hardin's regiment, the 29th U. S. Vol- 
unteer Infantry, on November 3, 1899, the writer was 
immediately detailed to the Maccabebee scouts, to 
take the place of Lieutenant Boutelle, of the regular 
artillery, a young West Pointer from Oregon, who had 
been killed a day or two previous, and reported to 
Major C. G. Starr, General Lawton's Adjutant- General 
in the field (whom he had known at Santiago de Cuba 
the previous year) at San Isidro on or about November 
8th. Major Starr said : ' ' We took this town last spring, ' ' 
stating how much our loss had been in so doing, "but, 
partly as a result of the Schurman Commission par- 
leying with the insurgents General Otis had us fall 
back. We have just had to take it again." General 
Lawton garrisoned San Isidro this time once for all, 
and pressed on north, capturing the successive towns 
en route. Meantime, General Young's cavalry, and the 
Maccabebee scouts under Major Batson, a lieutenant 
of the regular army, and a medal-of-honor graduate of 
the Santiago campaign, were operating to the west of 
the general line of advance, striking insurgent detach- 
ments wherever found and driving them toward the 
line of the railroad. By November 13th, Lawton's 
advance had turned to the westward, according to the 
concerted plan of campaign above described, garrison- 
ing, as fast as they were taken, such of the towns of the 
country over which he swept as there were troops to 
spare for. We knew that Aguinaldo had been at Tar- 
lac when the advance began, and every officer and 
enlisted man of the command was on the qui v-ive to 
catch him. By November 18th, General Lawton's 
forces held a line of posts extending up the eastern 



236 American Occupation of Philippines 

side of the plain, and curving around across the 
northern end to within a few miles of the gulf of 
Lingayen. 

On November 6th, General Wheaton set sail from 
Manila for Lingayen Gulf, with 2500 men of the 
13th Regular and 33d Volunteer Infantry, and 
a platoon of the 6th Artillery, convoyed by the 
ships of the navy, and next day the expedition was 
successfully landed at San Fabian, "with effective 
assistance from the naval convoy against spirited 
resistance," says Secretary of War Root, in his annual 
report for 1899. The navy's assistance on that occa- 
sion was indeed "effective," but such passing mention 
hardly covers the case. In the first place, they selected 
the landing point, their patrols being already familiar 
with the coasts. As soon as the transports were sighted, 
about eleven o'clock on the morning of November 7th, 
Commander Knox, the senior officer present, who 
commanded the Princeton, and Commander Moore, 
of the Helena, went out to meet and confer with General 
Wheaton. This done, the landing was effected under 
protection of the navy's guns. Besides the naval 
vessels above named, there were also present the 
Bennington under Commander Arnold, the Manila 
under Lieutenant-Commander Nazro, and two captured 
Spanish gun-boats small enough to get close in shore, 
the Callao, and the Samar. The troops were disem- 
barked in two columns of small boats towed by launches. 
Lieutenant-Commander Tappan in charge of the 
Callao, and Ensign Mustin, commanding the Samar, 
were especially commended in the despatches of Admiral 
Watson, commander-in-chief of the Asiatic squadron. 
Both bombarded the insurgent trenches at close range 
during the landing, and Mustin actually steamed in 
between the insurgents and the head of the column of 



Otis and the War 237 

troop-boats, so as to intercept and receive the brunt 
of their fire himself, and, selecting a point about 
seventy-five yards from the enemy's trenches whence he 
could effectually pepper them, ran his ship aground so 
she would stick, and commenced rapid firing at point 
blank range, driving the enemy from his trenches, and 
enabling Colonel Hare of the 33d, and those who 
followed, to land without being subjected to further 
fire while on the water. 1 

On the nth of November, Colonel Hare with the 
33d Volunteer Infantry and one Gatling gun under 
Captain Charles R. Howland of the 28th Volun- 
teer Infantry, a lieutenant of the regular army, and a 
member of General Wheaton's staff, proceeded south- 
eastward to San Jacinto, and attacked and routed 
some 1200 to 1600 intrenched insurgents, Major 
John A. Logan being among our killed. The enemy 
left eighty-one dead in the trenches, and suffered a 
total loss estimated at three hundred. While space 
does not permit dwelling on the details of engagements, 
it may be remarked here, once for all, that the 33d 
Volunteer Infantry, Colonel Luther R. Hare command- 
ing, made more reputation than any other of the 
twenty-five regiments of the volunteer army of 1899, 
except, possibly, Colonel J. Franklin Bell's regiment, 
the 36th. This is no reflection on the rest. These 
two were lucky enough to have more opportunities. 
In meeting his opportunities, however, Colonel Hare, 
like Colonel Bell, proved himself a superb soldier; 

1 In alluding, in complimentary terms, to this officer's gallant conduct 
on that occasion, Harper's History of the War in the Philippines spells 
the name "Hustin," as it had previously misspelled the name of the star 
actor among the younger officers who participated in the Zapote River 
fight " Kanly." " Such is fame." The gentleman's right name is Mus- 
tin. He is now a lieutenant-commander, well known in the navy to-day* 
as the inventor of the "Mustin gun-sight." 



238 American Occupation of Philippines 

his field-officers, especially Major March, 1 were par- 
ticularly indefatigable; and his men were mostly 
Texans, accustomed to handling a rifle with effect. 
Space also forbids following Captain Howland and his 
Gatling gun into the engagement of November nth, 
but from the uniformity with which General Wheaton's 
official reports commend his young aide's bravery and 
efficiency on numerous occasions in 1 899-1 900, it may 
be safely assumed that those qualities were behind 
that Gatling gun at San Jacinto. There was a vicious 
rumor started after the San Jacinto fight and given 
wide circulation in the United States, that Major Logan 
was shot in the back by his own men. I' saw a major 
surgeon a few days later who had been an eye-w T itness 
to his death. He said an insurgent sharpshooter shot 
Major Logan from a tree, and that the said sharp- 
shooter was promptly thereafter dropped from his 
perch full of 33d Infantry bullets. Says General 
Wheaton's despatch of November 12th: "Major 
Logan fell while gallantly leading his battalion." 2 

On November 5th, General MacArthur, with a 
strong column, composed mainly of the 9th, 17th, 
and 36th Regiments of Infantry, two troops of 
the 4th Cavalry, two platoons of the 1st Artillery, 
and a detachment of scouts, advanced up the rail- 
road from Angeles, in execution of his part of the 
programme. 3 Angeles is some distance up the rail- 
road from Calumpit, where the railroad crosses the 

1 There is a notable unanimity, among the men in the army of about 
Major March's age and rank, in the opinion that he is a man of very extra- 
ordinary ability. This unanimity is so generous and genuine that I 
deem it a duty as well as a pleasure to emphasize it here. 

2 See Otis's Report covering September 1, 1899, to May 5, 1900, War 
Dept. Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 261. 

3 The 12th, part of the 25th, and the 32d Infantry being used to guard 
the railroad and for other purposes. 



Otis and the War 239 

Rio Grande. 1 General MacArthur's column encount- 
ered and overwhelmed the enemy at every point, enter- 
ing Tarlac on November 12th, and effecting a junction 
with General Wheaton at Dagupan, the northern 
terminus of the Manila-Dagupan Railroad, 120 
miles from Manila, on November 20th. 

After General Lawton had finished his part of the 
round-up, he had a final conference with General Young 
on November 18th at Pozorubio, which is near the 
northeastern border of the plain, bade him good-bye, 
and soon afterward went south to dispose of a body of 
insurgents who were giving trouble near Manila. It 
was in this last expedition that he lost his life at San 
Mateo about twelve miles out of Manila on December 
19, 1899. 

The first of the two purposes of the great Wheaton— 
Lawton-Mac Arthur northern advance, viz., the dis- 
persion of the insurgent army of northern Luzon had 
been duly accomplished. The other purpose had 
failed of realization. Aguinaldo had not been captured. 
He escaped through our lines. 

Such is in brief the story of the destruction of the 
Aguinaldo government in 1899 by General Otis, or rather 
by Mr. Root. But the trouble about it was that it 
would not stay destroyed. It " played possum" for 
a while, the honorable President retiring to permanent 
headquarters in the mountains "with his government 
concealed about his person," as Senator Lodge put it 
later in a summary of the case for the Administration, 
before the Senate, in the spring of 1900. If the dis- 
tinguished and accomplished senator from Massachu- 
setts, in adding at that time to the gaiety of nations , 

1 Calumpit will be remembered as the place where in the previous 
spring Colonel Funston and his Kansans performed the daring and suc- 
cessful manoeuvre of crossing the Bagbag River under fire. 



240 American Occupation of Philippines 

had had access to a certain diary kept by one of Agui- 
naldo's personal staff throughout that period, subse- 
quently submitted, in 1902, to the Senate Committee 
of that year, he could have swelled the innocuous merri- 
ment with such cheery entries as "Here we tightened 
our belts and went to bed on the ground" — the time 
alluded to being midnight after a hard day's march 
without food, the place, some chilly mountain top up 
which the "Honorable Presidente" and party had that 
day been guided by the ever-present and ever-willing 
paisano (fellow countryman) of the immediate 
neighborhood — whatever the neighborhood — to facili- 
tate them in eluding General Young's hard riding 
cavalry and scouts. The writer has no quarrel with 
Senator Lodge's witticism above quoted, having de- 
rived on reading it, in full measure, the suggestive 
amusement it was intended to afford. It is true that 
about all then left of the "Honorable Presidente's" 
government, for the nonce, was in fact concealed about 
his person. It was of a nature easily portable. It 
needed neither bull trains, pack ponies, nor coolies 
to carry it. It consisted solely of the loyal support of 
the whole people, who looked to him as the incarnation 
of their aspirations. Said General Mac Arthur to the 
Senate Committee in 1902 concerning Aguinaldo: 
"He was the incarnation of the feelings of the Fili- 
pinos." "Senator Culberson: 'And represented the 
Filipino people?' General MacArthur: 'I think so; 
yes'." 1 We of the 8th Army Corps did not know 
what a complete structure the Philippine republic of 
1898-9 was until, having shot it to pieces, we had 
abundant leisure to examine the ruins. To admit, in 
the same breath, participation in that war and profound 
regret that it ever had occurred, is not an incriminating 

1 Senate Document 331, pt. 2 (1902), p. 1926. 



Otis and the War 241 

admission. In this case as in any other where you have 
done another a wrong, by thrashing him or otherwise, 
under a mistake of fact, the first step toward righting 
the wrong is to frankly acknowledge it. As soon as 
Aguinaldo's flight and wanderings terminated in the 
finding of permanent headquarters, he began sending 
messages to his various generals all over Luzon and the 
other islands, and wherever those orders were not 
intercepted they were delivered and loyally obeyed. 
This kept up until General Funston captured him in 
1 90 1. One traitor among all those teeming millions 
might have betrayed his whereabouts, but none ap- 
peared. The obstinate character and long continuance 
of the warfare in northern Luzon after the great round- 
up which terminated with the final junction of the 
Lawton, Wheaton, and Mac Arthur columns near Dagu- 
pan, as elsewhere later throughout the archipelago, 
was at first very surprising to our generals. It had 
been supposed that to disperse the insurgent army 
would end the insurrection. As events turned out, it 
only made the resistance more effective. So long as 
the insurgents kept together in large bodies they could 
not hide. And as they were poor marksmen, while 
the men behind our guns, like most other young V 
Americans, knew something about shooting, the ratio 
of their casualties to ours was about 16 to I. 1 When 
General MacArthur began his advance on Tarlac, 
General Lawton his great march up the valley of the 
Rio Grande, and General Wheaton his closing in from 
Dagupan, Aguinaldo with his cabinet, generals, and 
headquarters troops abandoned Tarlac, their capital, 
and went up the railroad to Bayambang. Here they 
held a council of war, which General MacArthur 

1 This ratio is no jest. It is a statistical fact, figured out from one of 
the War Department Reports. 
16 



242 American Occupation of Philippines 

describes in his report for 1900 (from information ob- 
tained later on) as follows : 

At a council of war held at Bayambang, Pangasinan, 
about November 12, 1899, which was attended by General 
Aguinaldo and many of the Filipino military leaders, a reso- 
lution was adopted to the effect that the insurgent forces 
were incapable of further resistance in the field, and as a 
consequence it was decided to disband the army, the gen- 
erals and the men to return to their own provinces, with a 
view to organizing the people for general resistance by 
means of guerrilla warfare. J 

This had been the plan from the beginning, the coun- 
cil of war simply determining that the time to put the 
plan into effect had arrived. Accordingly, the uni- 
formed insurgent battalions and regiments broke up 
into small bands which maintained a most persistent 
guerrilla warfare for years thereafter. During those 
years they seldom wore uniforms, disappearing and 
hiding their guns when hotly pursued, and reappearing 
as non-combatant peasants interrupted in agricultural 
pursuits, with invariable protestations of friendship. 
Hence all such came to be known as amigos (friends), 
and the word amigo, or friend, became a bitter by- 
word, meaning to all American soldiers throughout the 
archipelago an enemy falsely claiming to be a friend. 
And every Filipino was an "amigo" 

Still, the volunteers had arrived in time to enable 
Mr. Root to make a very nice showing to Congress, 
and through it to the people, in his annual report to 
the President for 1899, dated November 29th. This 
report is full of cheerful chirps from General Otis to 
the effect that the resistance was practically ended, and 
the substance of the information it conveyed duly 

1 War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 59. 



Otis and the War 243 

found its way into the President's message of December 
of that year and through it to the general public. One 
of the Otis despatches said: "Claim to government by 
insurgents can be made no longer. ' ' x This message went 
on to state that nothing was now left but "banditti, " and 
that the people are all friendly to our troops. Thus 
misled, Mr. Root repeated to the President and through 
him to Congress and the country the following nonsense : 

It is gratifying to know that as our troops got away from 
the immediate vicinity of Manila they found the natives 
of the country exceedingly friendly * * *. This was doubt- 
less due in some measure to the fact that the Pampangos, 
who inhabit the provinces of Pampanga and Tarlac, and 
the Pangasinanes, who inhabit Pangasinan, as well as the 
other more northerly tribes, are unfriendly to the Tagalogs, 
and had simply submitted to the military domination of 
that tribe, from which they were glad to be relieved. 

In characterizing this as nonsense no disrespect is 
intended to Mr. Root. He did not know any better. 
He was relying on General Otis. But it is sorely 
difficult to convey in written words what utter nonsense 
those expressions about "the Pampangos" and "the 
Pangasinanes " are to any one who was in that northern 
advance in the fall of 1899. Imagine a British cabinet 
minister making a report to Parliament in 1776 couched 
in the following words, to wit: 

The Massachusetts-ites, who inhabit Massachusetts, and 
the Virginia-ites who inhabit Virginia, as well as most of the 
other inhabitants are unfriendlyto the New York-ites, and 
have simply submitted to the military domination of the 
last named, 

and you have a faint idea of the accuracy of Mr. 
Root's report. It is quite true that the Tagalos were 

1 Report of Secretary of War, 1899, p. 12. 



244 American Occupation of Philippines 

the prime movers in the insurrection against us, as they 
had been in all previous insurrections against Spain. 
But the "Tagalo tribe" was no more alone among the 
Filipino people in their wishes and views than the 
" unterrined " Tammany tribe who inhabit the wilds of 
Manhattan Island, at the mouth of the Hudson River, 
are alone in their views among our people. 

On page 70 of this report, Secretary Root reproduces 
a telegram from General Otis dated November 18, 
1899, stating that on the road from San Nicolas to 
San Manuel, a day or so previous, General Lawton 
was "cordially received by the inhabitants." He 
announces in the same telegram the drowning of Cap- 
tain Luna, a volunteer officer from New Mexico, who 
was one of General Lawton's aides, and had been a 
captain in Colonel Roosevelt's regiment of Rough 
Riders before Santiago. The writer happens to have 
been on that ride with General Lawton from San 
Nicolas to San Manuel, and was within a dozen feet 
of Captain Luna when the angry current of the Agno 
River caught him and his pony in its grip and swept 
both out of sight forever, along with divers troopers 
of the 4th Cavalry, horses and riders writhing to 
their death in one awful, tangled, struggling mass. He 
can never forget the magnificent dash back into the 
wide, ugly, swollen stream made by Captain Edward L. 
King of General Lawton's staff, as he spurred his horse 
in, followed by several troopers who had responded 
to his call for mounted volunteers to accompany him 
in an effort to save the lives of the men who went 
down. Their generous work proved futile. But it 
was inspired partly by common dread of what they 
knew would happen to any half-drowned soldier who 
might be washed ashore far away from the column and 
captured. If an army was ever "in enemy's country" 



Otis and the War 245 

it was then and there. When we reached San Manuel 
that night, Captains King and Sewall, the two sur- 
viving personal aides of General Lawton 's staff, and 
the writer, stopped, along with the general, in a little 
nipa shack on the roadside. General Lawton, was in an 
upper room busy with couriers and the like, but down- 
stairs King, Sewall, and myself set to work to buscar 1 
something to eat. I got hold of an hombre (liter- 
ally, a man; colloquially a native peasant man), who 
went to work with apparent alacrity, and managed to 
provide three ravenously hungry young men with a 
good meal of chicken, eggs, and rice. After supper, 
being new in the country, the writer remarked to the 
general on the alacrity of the hombre. I had brought 
out from the United States the notions there current 
about the nature of the resistance. General Lawton 
said, with a humorous twinkle in those fine eyes of his : 
"Humph! If you expected to be killed the next 
minute if you did n't find a chicken, you 'd probably 
find one too." It is true that in the course of the 
campaign General Young sent a telegram to General 
Otis at Manila characterizing his reception at the hands 
of the natives as friendly. This was prompted by our 
column being met as it would come into a town by the 
town band. It did not take long to see through this, 
and other like hypocrisy entirely justifiable in war, 
though such tactics deceived us for a little while at 
first into thinking the people were genuine amigos 
(friends). General Otis, not being near the scene, 
remained under our original brief illusion. Let us 
return, however, from Mr. Root's "patient and uncon- 
senting millions dominated by the Tagalo tribe," of 

1 Campaign Spanish for "look for." Generals Lawton and Young 
had cut loose from their base of supplies and their command was trusting 
for subsistence to living upon the country. 



246 American Occupation of Philippines 

1899, to the facts, and follow the course of events 
succeeding Lawton's junction with Wheaton and Mac- 
Arthur and his farewell to Young. 

General Young, with his cavalry, and the Maccabebee 
scouts, continued in pursuit of Aguinaldo through the 
passes of the mountains, the latter having managed to 
run the gauntlet of our lines successfully by a very close 
shave. How narrowly he escaped is illustrated by the 
fact that after a fight we had at the Aringay River on 
November 19th, in which Major Batson was wounded 
while gallantly directing the crossing of the river, we 
remained that night in the town of Aringay, and at 
the very time we were "hustling for chow" in Aringay, 
Aguinaldo was in the village of Naguilian an hour or so 
distant, as was authoritatively ascertained long after- 
ward from a captured diary of one of his staff officers. r 

General Young proceeded up the coast road, in hot 
haste, taking one town, San Fernando de Union, after 
a brief engagement led by the general in person — 
imagine a brigadier-general leading a charge at the head 
of thirty-seven men! — but Aguinaldo had turned off 
to the right and taken to the mountains. General 
Lawton wired General Otis about that time, in effect, 

1 See translation of diary of Major Simeon Villa, Senate Document 
331, pt. 3, 57th Cong., 1st Sess. (1902), p. 1988. It was in this 
Aringay fight that one of the narrowest escapes from death in battle 
ever officially authenticated occurred. Lieutenant Dennis P. Quinlan, 
now a captain of the 5th U. S. Cavalry, was struck just over the heart 
by an insurgent bullet (probably more or less spent) while crossing the 
river in the face of a hot fire, the bullet being deflected by a plug of 
tobacco carried in the breast pocket of the regulation campaign blue 
shirt he was wearing, which pocket, any one acquainted with that shirt 
will remember, is at the left breast just over the heart (War Department 
Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 6, pt. 166, 279). He was knocked over, but 
soon recovered and went on. The flesh of the left breast over the heart 
was bruised black and blue. He was recommended for a medal of 
honor on account of the incident (War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., 
pt. 7, p. 136). 



Otis and the War 247 

in announcing Aguinaldo's escape through our lines 
and his own tireless brigade-commander's bold dash 
in pursuit of him with an inadequate force of cavalry 
hampered by lack of horseshoes and nails for the same, 
"If Young does not catch Aguinaldo, he will at least 
make him very unhappy." The Young column 
garrisoned the towns along the route over which it 
went, occupying all the western part of Northern 
Luzon, hereafter described, and also later on rescued 
Lieutenant Gilmore of the navy, Mr. Albert Sonnichsen, 
previously an enlisted man and since a writer of some 
note, and other American prisoners who had been in 
the hands of the insurgents for many months. General 
Young finally made his headquarters at Vigan, in the 
province of Ilocos Sur, a fine town in a fine country. 
The Ilocanos are called "the Yankees of the Philip- 
pines, ' ' on account of their energy and industry. Vigan 
is on the China sea coast of Luzon (the west coast), 
about one hundred miles up the old Spanish coast road, 
or "King's Highway" (Camino Real), from Lingayen 
Gulf (where the hundred-and-twenty mile railroad from 
Manila to Dagupan ends) and about eighty miles from 
the extreme northern end of the island of Luzon. x 

As subsequent policies and their effect on one's 
attitude toward a great historic panorama do not inter- 
fere in the least with a proper appreciation of the 
bravery and efficiency of the army of one's country, 
it is with much regret that this narrative cannot 
properly chronicle in detail what the War Depart- 
ment reports record of the stirring deeds of General 
Young, and the officers and men of his command, 
Colonels Hare and Howze, Captains Chase and Dodd, 

1 If these figures are not exact, they are approximately correct. We 
always called it three hundred miles from Manila to the northern end of 
Luzon via Vigan and the lighthouse at Cape Bojeador. 



248 American Occupation of Philippines 

and the rest, x performed during the long course of the 
work now under consideration. One incident, however, 
is appropriate in this connection, not only to a collection 
of genre pictures of the war itself, but also to a place among 
the lights and shadows of the general picture of the 
American occupation. On December 2, 1899, Major 
March of the 33d Infantry had his famous fight at Tila 
pass, in which young Gregorio del Pilar, one of the ablest 
and bravest of the insurgent generals, was killed. The 
locality mentioned is a wild pass in the mountains of the 
west coast of Luzon, that overlook the China Sea, some 
4500 feet above sea level. It was strongly fortified, and 
was believed by the insurgents to be impregnable. The 
trail winds up the mountains in a sharp zigzag, and 
was commanded by stone barricades loop-holed for 
infantry fire. The advance of our people was checked 
at first by a heavy fire from these barricades. The 
approach being precipitous, it looked for a while as if 
the position would indeed be impregnable, and the idea 
of taking it by a frontal attack was abandoned. But a 

1 For instance, there was what used to be known to the 8th Corps 
as "Col. Jim Parker's night attack at Vigan," which occurred early in 
December, 1899, soon after that place was occupied, the insurgents com- 
ing into the town in large numbers, at night under command of General 
Tifiio, through a tunnel so it was said, and being driven out only after 
desperate close quarters' fighting from about two o'clock in the morning 
until after broad daylight, leaving the streets and plaza of Vigan much 
cumbered with their dead. Again, later on, there was the sudden order, 
swiftly executed, in obedience to which Lieutenant Grayson V. Heidt 
with a part of a troop of the 3d Cavalry, rode from Laoag to Batac to 
the rescue of a besieged garrison at the latter place, arriving in time to 
prevent a small Custer massacre, the garrison having gotten short of 
ammunition, and having just managed to telegraph for reinforcements 
a few moments before the enemy cut the telegraph wire. Then, there 
was Lieutenant Hannay, of the 22d Infantry, who being at the front, re- 
ceived an order from General Lawton to come back to build a bridge. 
The order made him sick, the surgeon reported him sick, the messenger 
returned with that message, and then Hannay promptly got well, and 
stayed at the front. And so on, ad infinitum. 



Otis and the War 249 

hill to the left front of the barricade was seized by some 
of our sharpshooters — those Texans of the 33d were in- 
deed sharpshooters — and after that, under cover of their 
fire, our troops managed to get in a fire simultaneously 
both on the flank and rear of the occupants of the barri- 
cades, climbing the precipitous slope up the mountain 
side by means of twigs and the like, and finally killing 
some fifty-two of the enemy, General Pilar among the 
number. After the fight was over, Lieutenant Quinlan, 
heretofore mentioned, moved by certain indignities in 
the nature of looting perpetrated upon the remains of 
General Pilar, buried them with such military honors as 
could be hastilyprovided, after first taking from a pocket 
of the dead general's uniform a souvenir in the shape of 
an unfinished poem written in Spanish by him the night 
before, addressed to his sweetheart ; and, the burial fin- 
ished, the American officer placed on the rude headstone 
left to mark the spot this generous inscription: 

General Gregorio Pilar, killed at the battle of Tila Pass, 
December 2d, 1899, commanding Aguinaldo's rear- guard. 
An officer and a gentleman. (Signed) D. P. Quinlan, 26. 
Lieutenant, nth Cavalry. 

The brief incident over, Quinlan hurried on, rejoined 
the column, and resumed the work of Benevolent As- 
similation and the war against Home Rule with all 
the dauntless ardor of his impetuous Irish nature. 
Whatever the ultimate analysis of the ethics of this 
scene — Quinlan at the grave of Pilar — clearly the 
Second Lieutenant Quinlan of 1899 would hardly have 
agreed with the vice-presidential candidate of 1900, 
Colonel Roosevelt, that granting self-government to 
the Filipinos would be like granting self-government to 
an Apache reservation under some local chief. 

The territory occupied and finally "pacified" by 



250 American Occupation of Philippines 

General Young, with the effective assistance of the 
officers heretofore mentioned, and many other good 
men and true, was ultimately organized into a military 
district, which was called the First District of the De- 
partment of Northern Luzon. As territory was fought 
over, occupied, and finally reduced to submission, that 
territory would be organized into a military district by 
the commanding general or colonel of the invading 
column, under the direction of the division commander. 
The military "Division of the Philippines," which was 
succeeded by the Civil Government of the Philippines 
under Governor Taft in 1901, of course covered all the 
territory ceded by the Treaty of Paris. It was divided 
into four "Departments," the Department of Northern 
Luzon, the Department of Southern Luzon, the Depart- 
ment of the Visayas, z and the Department of Mindanao 
and Jolo. General Young commanded the First District 
of the Department of Northern Luzon — which included 
the three west coast provinces north of Lingayen Gulf, 
and the three adjacent mountain provinces — from the 
time he led his brigade into that region in pursuit of Agui- 
naldo until shortly before Governor Taft's inauguration 
in the summer of 1901. Many were the combats, great 
and small, of General Young's brigade, in compassing 
the task of crushing the resistance in that part of Luzon 
into which he led the first American troops in the winter 
of 1 899-1 900. The resistance was obstinate, desperate, 
and long drawn out, but when he finally reported the 
territory under his command "pacified, " it was pacified. 
A soldier's task had been performed in a soldierly 
manner. The work had been done thoroughly. General 

1 The Visayan Islands — the half-dozen islands between Luzon and 
Mindanao already mentioned, as the only ones worth mentioning for 
our purposes, together with the various smaller islands, islets, and rocks 
"visible at high water." 



Otis and the War 251 

Young gave the Ilocano country a lesson it never forgot, 
before politics had time to interfere. We have never 
had any trouble in that region from that day to this. 
Before the army of occupation had had time to do in 
southern Luzon what General Young did in northern 
Luzon and thereby secure like permanent results in 
that region, a "peace-at-any-price" policy was in- 
augurated to meet the exigencies of Mr. McKinley's 
campaign for the Presidency in 1900. Our last mar- 
tyred President clung all through that campaign to 
his original assumption that Benevolent Assimilation 
would work, and that the single burning need of the 
hour was to make clear to the Filipinos what our 
intentions were — as if powder and lead did not spell 
denial of independence plain enough, as if that were not 
the sole issue, and as if that issue had not been sub- 
mitted, with deadly finality, to the stern arbitrament 
of war. However, neither Lord Roberts in India, nor 
Lord Kitchener in Egypt ever more effectively con- 
vinced the people of those countries that his flag must 
be respected as an emblem of sovereignty, than General 
Young did the Ilocanos. Take the month of April, 
1900 for instance. Several days after the expiration 
of said month (on May 5th) General Otis was relieved 
and went home. During the month of April, General 
Young killed five hundred insurgents in his district. 1 
But this did not prevent General Otis, arriving as he 
did in the United States in the month of June, when the 
national political conventions meet, from "repeating 

1 "During April, in the First District, comprising the provinces of 
Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, Union, Abra, Lepanto, Benguet, and Bontoc, 
Brigadier General S. B. M. Young, commanding, the insurgents mani- 
fested considerable activity and endeavored to take the offensive against 
the scattered detachments in the district. The insurgents were in every 
instance defeated, and lost more than 500 men killed." War Dept. 
Report 1900, vol. i., pt.-5, p. 196. 



252 American Occupation of Philippines 

the same old story about the insurrection going to 
pieces" 1 — only, not "going" now, but "gone." Nor 
did it, and like sputterings of insurrection all over the 
place, prevent Judge Taft — the "Mark Tapley of this 
Philippine business" as he humorously told the Senate 
Committee of 1902 he had been called — from cabling 
home, during the presidential campaign of 1900, a series 
of superlatively optimistic bulletins, 2 based on the testi- 
mony of Filipinos who had abandoned the cause of their 
country as soon as patriotism meant personal peril, all 
such testimony being eagerly accepted, as testimony of 
the kind one wants and needs badly usually is, in total 
disregard of information directly to the contrary fur- 
nished by General MacArthur and other distinguished 
soldiers who had been then on the ground for two years. 
The area and population of the territory occupied by 
General Young, the "First District of the Department 
of Northern Luzon," was, according to the Census of 
1903, as follows: 



Province 


Area (sq. m.) 3 


Populate 


Ilocos Norte 


1,330 


178,995 


Ilocos Sur 


471 


187,411 


Union 


634 


137339 


Abra 


1,171 


51,860 


Lepanto-Bontoc 


5 2,005 


72,750 


Benguet 


822 


22,745 



6,433 651,600 

1 The language quoted is that employed by Robert Collins, Associated 
Press Correspondent, in connection with the Round Robin incident of 
nine months previous, described in the concluding part of the chapter 
preceding this. 2 Hereinafter more fully set forth. 

3 For the Table of Areas, see Philippine Census, vol. L, p. 58. 

4 For the Table of Populations, see Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 123. 

s Under the Spaniards, these were two provinces. They were com- 
bined by us. 



Otis and the War 253 

As this narrative purposes so to present the geography 
of the Philippine Islands as to facilitate an easy remem- 
brance of the essentials only of the governmental problem 
there presented, we will hereafter speak of the First 
District as containing, roughly, 6500 square miles, 
and 650,000 people. Whenever, if ever, a Philippine 
republic is set up, these six provinces are very likely, 
for geographical and other reasons, to become one 
of the original states comprising that republic, just 
as the states of Mexico are made up of groups of 
provinces. z 

The rest of the story of the northern campaign of 
1 899-1 900 immediately following Aguinaldo's escape 
into the mountains through General Young's and 
General Lawton's lines, being a necessary part of the 
American occupation of the Philippines, may also 
serve as a text for further acquainting the reader 
with the geography of Luzon. War is the best 
possible teacher of geography, and it may be well 
to communicate in broken doses, as we received 
them, the lessons on the subject which the 8th 
Army Corps learned in 1899 and the subsequent 
years so thoroughly that we could all pronounce with 
astonishing glibness, the most unpronounceable names 
imaginable. 

When the great Wheaton-Lawton-MacArthur 
" Round-up* ' reached the mountains on the northeast 
of the great central plain, in the latter part of November 
1899, Captain Joseph B. Batchelor, with one battalion 
of the 24th (negro) Infantry, and some scouts under 
Lieutenant Castner, a very intrepid and tireless officer, 
boldly cut loose from the column of which he was 

1 A province in Latin countries corresponds more nearly to what we 
call a county than to anything else familiar to our system of political 
divisions. 



254 American Occupation of Philippines 

a part, and, pressing on over the Caranglan pass, 
overran the province of Nueva Vizcaya, which is part 
of the watershed of north central Luzon, proceeding 
from Bayombong, the capital of Nueva Vizcaya, down 
the valley of the Magat River, by the same route 
Messrs. Wilcox and Sargent of the navy had made 
their pleasant junket in the fall of 1898 as described 
in Chapter VI {ante). Following this route Captain 
Batchelor finally came into Isabela province, where 
the Magat empties into the Cagayan River, reaching 
Iligan, the capital of Isabela, ninety miles northeast of 
Bayombong, about December 8th. From Iligan 
Batchelor went on, promptly overcoming all resistance 
offered, down the great Cagayan valley, some no 
miles due north, to the sea at Aparri, the northern- 
most town of Luzon and of the archipelago, where he 
met two vessels of our navy, the Newark and the 
Helena, under Captain McCalla, and found, to his 
inexpressible (but partially and rather fervently 
expressed) chagrin, that the insurgents who had fled 
before him, and also the garrison at Aparri, had already 
surrendered to the navy. The territory thus covered 
by Batchelor 's bold, brilliant, and memorable march 
over two hundred miles of hostile country from the 
mountains of central Luzon down the Cagayan valley 
to the northern end of the island, at Aparri, J consisted 
of the three provinces of Cagayan, Isabela, and Nueva 
Vizcaya. The area and population of these three, 

1 For the details of this march, see War Department Report, 1900, 
vol. L, pt. 4, p. 309. Captain Batchelor had neither orders nor per- 
mission to do what he did. When he cut loose from the command he 
belonged to, he took very long chances on finding subsistence for his 
men in the unknown country he had set out to conquer, to say nothing 
of the highly probable chances of annihilation of his whole command. 
When an officer commanding troops does this in time of war, he does so 
at his peril, and signal success is his only salvation. 



Otis and the War 255 

according to the census tables of 1903, are as 
follows : 

Province Area (sq. m.) 1 Population 2 

Cagayan 5,052 156,239 

Isabela 5,018 76,431 

Nueva Vizcaya 1,950 62,541 



Total 12,020 295,211 

The troops of Captain Batchelor's command were 
later on relieved by the 16th Infantry, commanded 
by Colonel Hood, under whom the above group of 
three provinces finally became the " Second District 
of the Department of Northern Luzon." As part of 
the plan to provide the reader with a fair general idea 
of Luzon conveniently portable in memory, he is 
requested to note, at this point, that hereinafter the 
Cagayan valley, with its three provinces, 3 will be 
alluded to as a district containing 12,000 square miles 
and 300,000 people. As was remarked concerning the 
original military district commanded by General 
Young, to wit, the First District, so of Colonel Hood's 
district, the Second — that is to say, as the Ilocano 
country may some day become the state of Ilocos, so, 
for like geographical and other governmental reasons, 
the three provinces of the Cagayan valley may some 
day become the state of Cagayan in the possible 
Philippine republic of the future. 

1 Area tables, Philippine Census, vol. i., p. 58. 

2 Population tables, Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 123. 

^ Though Nueva Vizcaya is not in the Cagayan valley, but on a 
plateau of the great divide, still, its streams all flow into the Cagayan 
valley, and that term will be used in this book, as it is colloquially in 
the Philippines, to include not only the Cagayan valley proper, but 
also the adjoining tributary province of Nueva Vizcaya. 



256 American Occupation of Philippines 

Having now followed the "far-flung battle line" 
of the volunteers of '99 and their comrades in arms, 
the regulars, from Manila northward across the rice 
paddies of central Luzon and over the mountains 
to the northern extremity of the island, let us return 
to the central plain, for reasons which will be stated 
in so doing. Between the China Sea and the coast 
range which forms the western boundary of the cen- 
tral plain of Luzon, there is a long strip of terri- 
tory — a west wing of the plain, as it were — about 
125 miles long, with an average width of not 
more than twenty miles, stretching from Manila Bay 
to Lingayen Gulf. This is divided, for governmental 
purposes into two provinces, Bataan on the south, 
whose southern extremity lay on Admiral Dewey's 
port side as he entered Manila Bay the night before 
the naval battle of May 1, 1898, and Zambales on the 
north. The area and population of this territory are 
as follows : 

Province Area (sq. m.) Population 

Bataan 537 46,787 

Zambales 2,125 104,549 



2,662 I5M36 

Also, between the Pacific Ocean and the coast range 
which forms the eastern boundary of the plain is a 
longer, narrower, and very sparsely populated strip, 
or east wing, divided also into two provinces, Principe 
on the north and Infanta on the south, each supposed 
to contain about fifteen thousand people. Principe 
and Infanta are wholly unimportant, except that, to 
avoid confusion, we must account for all the provinces 
visible on the maps of Luzon. These two provinces 



Otis and the War 257 

never gave any trouble and no one ever bothered about 
them. 1 In the mountains of Zambales and Bataan, 
however, as in most of the other provinces of the archi- 
pelago, the struggle was long kept up, just as the 
Boers kept up their war for independence against 
Great Britain about the same time, by guerrilla 
warfare. 

The central plain with five provinces has already 
been fully described. If to this plain you add its two 
wings, above mentioned, you have the nine provinces 
of central Luzon you see on the map. And if to them 
you add the six provinces of the Ilocos country and the 
three of the Cagayan valley, you have clearly before 
you the political make-up of northern Luzon — eighteen 
provinces in all. When central Luzon was arranged 
by districts under the military occupation, it was 
divided into three parts, the Third, Fourth, and Fifth 
districts of the Department of Northern Luzon, the 
Third District being under General Jacob H. Smith of 
Samar fame, 2 the Fourth under General Funston, and 
the Fifth under General Grant. The Sixth and last 
district of northern Luzon was made up of the city of 
Manila and adjacent territory. 

1 The only thing of interest to the American people that ever hap- 
pened over there was the capture of Lieutenant Gilmore of the Navy, 
and his men, at Baler, on the Pacific coast, in Principe, a capture which, 
it will be recollected, was followed by long captivity, and ultimately 
terminated in rescue. The interested student will see these two pro- 
vinces on the American maps of the islands, but they were each attached 
by the Taft government for administration purposes to another pro- 
vince, and do not appear in the American census list of provinces. 
Therefore, they cut no figure in the census totals, either of area or popu- 
lation. 

2 The officer on whom public attention in the United States was later 
focussed by an alleged order, charged to have been issued by him in a 
campaign in Samar to "kill everything over ten years old." This alleged 
order was called by the American newspapers of the period "Jake Smith's 
Kill and Burn Order." 



258 American Occupation of Philippines 

General Smith's district, the Third, comprised the 
provinces of 



Province 

Zambales 

Pangasinan 

Tarlac 


Area (sq. m.) 
2,125 

1,193 
1,205 


Population 

104,549 
397,902 

135,107 



4,523 637,558 

Pangasinan with its near 400,000 people is the largest, 
in point of population, of the twenty-five provinces of 
Luzon, and the third largest of the archipelago. 

General Funston's district, the Fourth, comprised 
the provinces of 



Province 


Area (sq. m.) 


Population 


Nueva Ecija 


2,169 


I34,H7 


Principe 1 


331 


15,853 




2,500 


150,000 


General Grant's 


district, the Fifth, 


comprised the 


provinces of 






Province 


Area (sq. m.) 


Population 


Bataan 


537 


46,787 


Pampanga 


868 


223,754 


Bulacan 


1,173 


223,742 



2,578 494,283 

2,500 150,000 



Totals, 4th and 5th 

Districts: 5,078 644,283 

x The figures as to Principe are mere arbitrary guesses, the exact 
figures used being fixed on merely to get convenient round numbers, 
there being no statistics as to Principe. 



Otis and the War 259 

It will be seen from the foregoing that the Third 
District was nearly equal in area to the Fourth and 
Fifth added together, and that the same was true as 
to its population figure. 

Just as the six provinces of the Ilocano country, 
first occupied by General Young and organized 
as "The First District of the Department of North- 
ern Luzon," should some day evolve into a State 
of Ilocos, and the three provinces of the Cagayan 
valley, occupied by Colonel Hood as the Second 
District, into an ultimate State of Cagayan, so the 
provinces of General Smith's old district, the Third, 
should finally become a State of Pangasinan. * This 
Third District may be conveniently recollected as 
accounting for, roughly speaking, 4500 square miles 
of territory and 625,000 people. The total com- 
bined area of General Funston's old district, the 
Fourth, 2 and the adjacent one, the Fifth, General 
Grant's district, is — roughly — 5000 square miles, and 
its total population 650,000. No reason is appar- 
ent why these two districts, the Fourth and Fifth, 
should not ultimately evolve into a State of Pampanga. 
The five original military districts, 3 which in 1900 
constituted all of the Department of Northern Luzon 
except the city of Manila and vicinity, might make 
four ultimate states, with names, areas, and popula- 
tions as follows: 

1 Of course the Filipinos should be consulted as to what prov- 
inces should constitute each state, but I am simply sketching a 
tentative governmental scheme based upon the way our army 
perfected its original grip on public order and the general adminis- 
trative situation. 

2 All along here we, of course, deal in round numbers only. 

3 See War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., part 5, pp. 45 et seq. The 
city of Manila and vicinity constituted the Sixth District of the Depart- 
ment of Northern Luzon. 



260 American Occupation of Philippines 



State 

Ilocos 
Cagayan 
Pangasinan 
Pampanga 


A\ 


rea (sq. m.) 

6,500 

12,000 

4,500 

5,000 


Population 

650,000 
300,000 
625,000 
650,000 




28,000 


2,225,000 



It may surprise the reader after all the blood and 
thunder to which his attention has hereinabove been 
subjected, apropos of northern Luzon and the winter 
of 1 899-1 900, to know that the insurgents were still 
bearding the lion in his den, i. e., General Otis in Manila, 
by operating in very considerable force in the village- 
dotted country within cannon-shot of the road from 
Manila to Cavite in January, 1900. Nevertheless such 
was the case. 

On the 4th of January, 1900, General J. C. Bates was 
assigned to the command of the First Division of the 
Eighth Army Corps, General Lawton's old division, 
and an active campaign was commenced in southern 
Luzon. The plan adopted was that General Wheaton 
with a strong force should engage and hold the enemy 
in the neighborhood of Cavite, while General Schwan, 
starting at the western horn of the half moon to which 
the great lake called Laguna de Bay has already been 
likened, should move rapidly down the west shore of 
the lake, and around its south shore to Santa Cruz near 
its eastern end, or horn, garrisoning the towns en route, 
as taken, instead of leaving them to be re-occupied by 
the insurgents. Santa Cruz is the same place where 
General Lawton had ''touched second base," as it 
were, with a flying column in April, 1899. 

This plan was duly carried out. The Schwan column 
started from San Pedro Macati, the initial rendezvous, 



Otis and the War 261 

a few miles out of Manila, on January 4, 1900, now 
garrisoning the towns en route, instead of leaving them 
to be fought over and captured again as heretofore. 
The first stiff fight we had in that campaign was at Binan, 
on January 6, 1900, one of the places General Lawton's 
expedition had taken when he fought his way over the 
same country the year before. O. K. Davis and John 
T. McCutcheon, who were in that fight and campaign — 
in fact one of them had the ice-cold nerve to photograph 
the Binan fight while it was going on, as I learned when 
we all went down to the creek near the town, after we 
took it, to freshen up — can testify that we did not then 
hear any nonsense about a "Tagal" insurrection, such 
as Secretary of War Root's Report for 18 qq, published 
shortly before, is full of, and that on the contrary the 
whole country was as much a unit against us and as 
loyal to the Aguinaldo government as northern Luzon 
had been. And inasmuch as I am doing some "testi- 
fying" along here myself, and assuming to brush aside 
without the slightest hesitation, as wholly erroneous, 
information conveyed to the American public at the 
time in the state papers of President McKinley and 
Secretary of War Root, it is only due the reader, whose 
attention is being seriously asked, that "the witness" 
should "qualify" as to the opportunities he may have 
had, if any, to know whereof he speaks, concerning the 
character of the opposition. To that end, the follow- 
ing document, which General Schwan was kind enough 
to send me afterwards, is submitted as sent : 

EXTRACT COPY. 

Headquarters Detachment Macabebe Scouts. 
The Adjutant General, Sehwan's Expeditionary Brigade: 

Sir: I have the honor to submit the following report of 
the operations of the Detachment of Macabebe Scouts, 



262 American Occupation of Philippines 

under my command, while forming a part of your 
Brigade. 

The Detachment, consisting of five (5) officers and one 
hundred and forty (140) men, was divided into two com- 
panies, commanded by 1st Lt. J. Lee Hall, 33rd Inf., and 
1st Lt. Blount, 29th Inf., left San Pedro Macati the after- 
noon of Jan. 4th, 1900 * * *. 

$ :|c $ -$ $ $ $ 

I wish to invite your attention, especially, to the good 
work done in the fight at Bifian by Lieut. Blount, 29th Inf., 
who led the line by at least twenty-five yards * * *. 

Very Respectfully, 
Wm. C. Geiger, 1st Lt. 14th Inf., Com'd'g Det. 
I hereby certify that the above is a true copy of extracts 
from the report of the operations of the Detachment of 
Macabebe Scouts forming part of an Expeditionary Brigade 
under my command, in the months of January and February, 
1900. 

Theo. Schwan, 
Brig. General, U. S. Vols. 
Aug. 16, 1900. 

The activities of Generals Bates and Wheaton, and 
the Schwan Expedition of January-February, 1900, 
extended the American occupation, so far as there were 
troops enough immediately available to go around, 
over the lake-shore portions and the principal towns 
of the two great provinces of southern Luzon bordering 
on the Laguna de Bay, viz., Cavite and Laguna; and 
over parts of the two adjacent provinces of Batangas 
and Tayabas. 

Batangas bounds Cavite on the south, and is itself 
bounded on the south by the sea, where a fairly good 
port offered a fine gateway for smuggling arms into 
the interior from abroad. Tayabas province adjoins 
Laguna on the southeast. Cavite province has alw r ays 
been, since the opening of the Suez Canal, about 1869, 



Otis and the War 263 

and the agitations for political reform in Spain which 
culminated in the Spanish republic of 1873, quickened 
the thought of Spain's East Indies, the home of insur- 
rection, the breeding place of political agitation. 
Aguinaldo himself was born within its limits in 1869. 
Laguna province comprehends most of the country 
lying between the southern and eastern lake-shore of 
the Laguna de Bay and the mountains which skirt 
that body of water in the blue distance, all parts of it 
being thus in easy and safe touch by water transporta- 
tion by night with Cavite, the home and headquarters 
of insurgency. 

Just as northern Luzon had been gradually organized 
into military districts as conquered, so was southern 
Luzon. The territory, over-run, as above described, by 
Generals Bates, Wheaton, and Schwan, was divided into 
two districts. 1 Colonel Hare commanded the First 
District, Cavite province and vicinity. General Hall 
commanded the Second District, Batangas, Laguna, and 
Tayabas. The area and population of these four 
provinces, according to the Census of 1903, were as 
follows : 



Province 

Cavite 
Batangas 
Laguna 
Tayabas 


A\ 


r ea (sq. m.) 

619 
1,201 

629 
5,993 


Population 

. 134,779 
257,715 
148,606 

153,065 




8,442 

6 ' I 


694,165 



Q 



I? 



For convenience of subsequent allusion, this group of 
provinces may be treated as representing roughly 
8500 square miles of territory and 700,000 people. 

1 War Dept. Report, 1900, vol. i., part 5, pp. 47-8. 



264 American Occupation of Philippines 

These four provinces group themselves together natur- 
ally from a military standpoint. As physical force is 
the final basis of all government, these four provinces 
constitute a logical administrative governmental unit, 
as shown by the action of our military authorities in 
their extension of the American occupation. It would 
seem therefore that if there should ever be a Philippine 
republic, they would probably constitute one of its 
states — the State, let us say, of Cavite. 

The rest of southern Luzon below that part above 
described consists of a peninsula which, owing to its 
odd formation, is eas}^ to remember. The mainland of 
Luzon, that is to-say, that part of the island which our 
narrative has already covered, remotely suggests, in 
shape, the State of Illinois. At least it resembles 
Illinois more than it does any other State of our Union, 
in that its length runs north and south, and its average 
length and width are nearer that of Illinois than any 
other. At the southeast corner of this mainland, the 
observer of the map will see, jutting off to the southeast 
from the mainland, the peninsula in question. It is 
about a hundred and fifty miles long, with an average 
width of possibly thirty miles — a minimum width of, 
say, ten miles, and a maximum of fifty, — and is separated 
from Samar by the narrow, swift, and treacherous San 
Bernardino Strait, which connects the Pacific Ocean 
with the China Sea. This peninsula is frequently 
called "the Hemp Peninsula." The importance of 
controlling the hemp ports prompted General Otis to 
send General Bates with an expedition to those ports 
on February 15, 1900. J This expedition did little more 
than occupy those ports. The great interior continued 
under insurgent control some time afterward. The 
report of the Secretary of War, Air. Root, for 1900, goes 

1 War Dept. Report, 1900, vol. i., part 1, p. 9. 



Otis and the War 265 

on to describe an engagement, or two, sustained by the 
Bates Expedition shortly after it landed, and concludes, 
with a complacency almost Otis-like, by stating that 
shortly thereafter "the normal conditions of industry 
and trade relations with Manila were resumed by the 
inhabitants." Of course Mr. Root believed this, and 
so did Mr. McKinley. More the pity, as we shall 
later see. General Otis was now getting anxious to go 
home, and hastened to "occupy" and organize the 
rest of the archipelago, on paper, at least, the hemp 
peninsula becoming, on March 20, 1900, the Third 
District of the Department of Southern Luzon, Briga- 
dier-General James M. Bell commanding. The pro- 
vinces comprised in this district, with their areas and 
populations as given by the Census of 1903, were as 
follows : 

Province Area (sq. m.) Population 

Camarines 1 3,279 239,405 

Albay 1,783 240,326 

Sorsogon 755 120,495 



5,817 600,226 

For convenience of subsequent allusion, these three 
provinces of the hemp peninsula which constituted the 
Third Military District of the Military Department of 
Southern Luzon in 1900, may be regarded as compris- 
ing, roughly, 6000 square miles of territory and 600,000 
people. If the Philippine republic of the future which 
is the dream of the Filipino people, prove other than 
an idle dream, the hemp peninsula will probably some 
day constitute a state of that republic, an appropriate 

1 The Spanish word camarin means a warehouse. The province of 
Camarines was originally two provinces, and is still referred to as two, 
though governmentally but one. 



266 American Occupation of Philippines 

and probable name for which would be the State of 
Camarines. 

The Fourth District of southern Luzon — there 
were but four — was occupied by the 29th U. S. 
Volunteer Infantry, commanded by Colonel E. E. 
Hardin, one of the best executive officers General Otis 
had in his whole command. The Fourth District 
comprised a lot of islands unnecessary to be considered 
at length in this bird's-eye view of the panorama, but 
necessary to be mentioned in outlining the military 
occupation. The 29th, like the other twenty-four 
volunteer regiments, settled down with equanimity to 
the business of policing a hostile country, sang with 
zest, like the rest of the twenty-five volunteer regi- 
ments, that old familiar song, "Damn, Damn, Damn 
the Filipino, " etc., and waited with the uniquely ad- 
mirable stoicism of the American soldier for the season 
of their home-going to roll round, which, under the 
Act of Congress, x would be the spring of the following 
year. 

In volume i., part 5, War Department Report, 1899, 
at pages, 5 et seq., may be found a journal illustrating the 
nature of the "police" work done by the volunteers of 
1899, in 1900, and at pages 5 et seq. of the same report 
for 1900 (volume i., part 4) may be found a similar 
diary carried up to June 30, 1901. Throughout the 
period covered by those reports, scarcely a day passed 
without what the military folk coolly call "contacts" 
with the enemy. 

The Visayan Islands were in course of time duly 
organized, as Luzon had previously been, department- 
ally and by military districts. The Visayan Islands 
became the Department of Visayas, divided into 

1 Of March 2, 1899. Under it the term of enlistment of the volun- 
teers was to expire June 30, 1901. 



Otis and the War 267 

districts commanded either by regimental commanders 
having a regiment or more with them, or by general 
officers. For a long time no attempt to make military 
occupation effective in these various islands, save in the 
coast towns, was attempted. However, the indicated 
disposition of troops completed, technically at least, 
the American occupation of the Visayan Islands. 

Pursuant to the plan followed, as we have hitherto 
followed the army in our narrative, first throughout 
northern Luzon and later through southern Luzon, some 
data are now in order concerning the Visayan Islands. 

As already made clear, there are but six of the 
Visayan Islands with which any one interested in the 
Philippines merely as a student of world politics or of 
history need bother. The area and population of these 
are as follows : x 

Island Area (sq. m.) Population 

Panay 4,611 743,646 

Negros 4,881 460,776 

Cebu 1,762 592,247 

Leyte 2,722 356,641 

Samar 5,031 222,090 

Bohol 1,441 243,148 

Whenever, if ever, an independent republic is estab- 
lished in the Philippines, the six islands above men- 
tioned could and should constitute self-governing 
commonwealths similar to the several States of the 
American Union. The rest of the islands lying between 
Luzon and Mindanao could easily be disposed of govern- 
mentally by being attached to the jursidiction of one 
of the said six islands. 

1 Table of Areas, Philippine Census of iqoj, vol. i., p. 263. 
Table of Population, ib., vol. ii., pp. 123 et seq. 



268 American Occupation of Philippines 

Mindanao and the adjacent islets called Jolo were 
organized as the Department of Mindanao and Jolo, 
under General Kobbe, with the 31st Volunteer In- 
fantry, Colonel Pettit's regiment, the 40th Volun- 
teer Infantry, Colonel Godwin's regiment, and the 
23rd Regular Infantry. Thus the archipelago was 
completely accounted for, for the time being, just as 
all the territory of the United States was long ac- 
counted for by our military authorities at home, with 
the Department of the East, headquarters Governor's 
Island, New York ; the Department of the Lakes, head- 
quarters Chicago; the Department of the Gulf, head- 
quarters Atlanta, etc. In this state of the case, General 
Otis re-embraced his early pet delusion — if it was a 
delusion, which charity and the probabilities suggest it 
should be called — about the insurrection having gone 
to pieces; and decided to come home. Possibly, also, 
he was homesick. General Otis was a very positive 
character, a strong man. But even strong men get 
homesick after long exile. When you hear the call of 
the homeland after long residence "east of Suez," 
you must answer the call, duty not forbidding. General 
Otis had stood by his ink wells and the Administration 
with unswerving devotion for twenty months, and was 
entitled to come back home and tell the public all 
about the fighting in the Philippines, and how entirely 
over it was, and how wholly right Mr. McKinley was 
in his theory that the visible opposition to our rule and 
the seeming desire to be free and independent did not 
represent the wishes of the Filipino people at all, but 
only the "sinister ambitions of a few unscrupulous 
Tagalo leaders." Accordingly on May 5, 1900, he 
was relieved at his own request, and departed for the 
United States. He was succeeded in command by a 
very different type of man, Major-General Arthur 



Otis and the War 269 

MacArthur, upon whom now devolved the problem of 
holding down the situation and of actually getting it 
stably "well in hand" by June 30, 1901, the date of 
expiration of the term of enlistment of the twenty-five 
volunteer regiments organized under the Act of March 
2, 1899. 



CHAPTER XIII 
MacArthur and the War 

Damn, damn, damn the Filipino, 

Pock-marked khakiac ladrone; x 

Underneath the starry flag 

Civilize him with a Krag, 

And return us to our own beloved home. 

Army Song of the Philippines under MacArthur.* 

SOME one has said, "Let me write the songs of a 
people and I care not who makes their laws." 
Give me the campaign songs of a war, and I will so 
write the history of that war that he who runs may read, 
and, reading, know the truth. The volunteers of 1899 
had, most of them, been in the Spanish War of '98. 
That struggle had been so brief that, to borrow a phrase 
of the principal beneficiary of it, Colonel Roosevelt, 
there had not been "war enough to go 'round." The 
Philippine insurrection had already broken out when 
the Spanish War volunteers returned from Cuba in the 
first half of 1899. Few of them knew exactly where 
the Philippines were on the map. They' simply knew 
that we had bought the islands, that disturbances 
of public order were in progress there, and that the 
Government desired to suppress them. The President 
had called for volunteers. That was enough. When 
they reached the islands, instead of finding a lot of 

1 Copper-colored thief. 

2 Sung to the tune of "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching. ' ' 

270 



Mac Arthur and the War 271 

outlaws, brigands, etc., such as that pestiferous, ill- 
conditioned outfit of horse-thieves and cane-field 
burning patriots we volunteers of '98 had to comb out 
of the eastern end of Cuba under General Wood in the 
winter of 1898-9, they found Manila, on their arrival, 
practically almost a besieged city. They knew that 
the erroneous impression they had brought with them 
was the result of misrepresentation. Who was respon- 
sible for that misrepresentation they did not attempt 
to analyze. They simply set to work with American 
energy to put down the insurrection. Nobody ques- 
tioned the unanimity of the opposition. There it was, 
a fact — denied at home, but a fact. In the course of 
the fight against the organized insurgent army they lost 
a great many of their comrades, and in that way the 
unanimity of the resistance was quite forcibly impressed 
upon them. By kindred psychologic processes equally 
free from mystery, their determination to overcome the 
resistance early became very set — a state of mind which 
boded no good to the Filipinos. The army song given 
at the beginning of Chapter XI {ante) , in which General 
Otis is made to sing, after the fashion of some of the 
characters in Pinafore, that pensive query to himself 

Am I the boss, or am I a tool? 

the first stanza of which closes 

Now I 'd like to know who 's the boss of the show, 

Is it me or Emilio Aguinaldo? 

/ 
was ; a point of departure, in the matter of information, 
which served to acquaint them with all that had gone 
before. They resented the loss of prestige to American 
arms and desired to restore that prestige. While 
engaged in so doing, they became aware, during the 



272 American Occupation of Philippines 

Presidential year 1900, that the campaign of that year 
in the United States was based largely upon the pre- 
tence that the majority of the Filipinos welcomed our 
rule. Naturally, their experience led them to a very 
general and very cordial detestation of this pretence. 
For one thing, it was an unfair belittling of the actual 
military service they .were rendering. People hate a 
lie whether they are able to trace its devious windings 
to its source or sources, or to analyze all its causes, or 
calculate all its possible effects, or not. The real 
rock-bottom falsehood, not as fully understood then as 
it became later, consisted in the impression sought to 
be produced at home, in order to get votes, that the 
great body of the Filipino people were not really in 
sympathy with their country's struggle for freedom, 
and would be really glad tamely to accept the alien 
domination so benevolently offered by a superior people, 
but were being coerced into fighting through intimida- 
tion by a few selfish leaders acting for their own selfish 
ends. While our fighting generals in the field, — General 
MacArthur, for instance, whose interview with a news- 
paper man just after the fall of Malolos, in March, 
1899, subsequently verified by him before the Senate 
Committee of 1902, has already been noticed — at first 
believed that it was only a faction that we- had to 
contend with, they soon discovered that the whole 
people were loyal to Aguinaldo and the cause he^ repre- 
sented. But, while the point as to how unanimous the 
resistance was remained a disputed matter for- some 
little time among those of our people who did not have 
to "go up against it," the most curious fact of "(that 
whole historic situation, to my mind, is the absolute 
identity of the disputed suggestion with that which h*ad 
previously been used in like cases in all ages by the 
powerful against people struggling to be free, and the 



MacArthur and the War 273 

cotemporaneous absence of any notation of the coin- 
cidence by any conspicuous spectator of the drama, to 
say nothing of us smaller fry who bore the brunt of the 
war or any portion of it. 

Those men of '99 in the Philippines realized in 1900, 
vaguely it may be, but actually, that they were waging a 
war of conquest after the manner of the British as sung 
by Kipling, but under the hypocritical pretence that 
they were doing missionary work to improve the 
Filipino. They did not know whether the Filipinos 
could or could not run a decent government if permitted. 
It was too early to form any judgment. And even 
then there was no unanimous feeling that they could 
not. Brigadier-General Charles King, the famous 
novelist, who was in the fighting out there during the 
first half of 1899, was quoted in the Catholic Citizen, of 
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in June, 1899, as having said 
in an interview given at Milwaukee: 

There is no reason in the world why the people should 
not have the self-government which they so passionately 
desire, so far as their ability to carry it on goes. 

The real reason why the war was being waged was 
stated with the honesty which heated public discussion 
always brings forth, by Hon. Charles Denby, a member 
of the Schurman Commission of 1899, m an article 
which appeared in the Forum for February, 1899, 
entitled "Why the Treaty Should be Ratified:" 1 

The cold, hard, practical question alone remains: "Will 
the possession of the islands benefit us as a nation?" If it 
will not, set them free to-morrow. 

But in the same magazine, the Forum, for June, 1900, 
in other words to the very same audience, in an article 

1 See Forum, vol. xxvi., p. 647. 

18 



274 American Occupation of Philippines 

whose title is a protest, "Do we Owe the Filipinos 
Independence?" we find this same distinguished diplo- 
mat sagaciously deferring to that not inconsiderable 
element of the American public which is opposed to 
wars for conquest, with the rank hypocrisy which must 
ever characterize a republic warring for gain against the 
ideals that made it great, thus : 

A little time ought to be conceded to the Administration 
to ascertain what the wish of the people [meaning the people 
of the Philippine Islands]*really is ; z 

adding some of the stale but ever- welcome salve 
originally invented by General Otis for use by Mr. 
McKinley on the public conscience of America, about 
the war having been "fomented by professional politi- 
cians, " and not having the moral support of the whole 
people. "A majority of the Filipinos are friendly to 
us," he says. Even as early as January 4, 1900, in 
the New York Independent, we find Mr. Denby aban- 
doning all his previous honesty of 1899 about "the cold, 
hard, practical question," and rubbing his hands with 
invisible soap to the tune of the following hypocrisy : 

Let us find out how many of the people want indepen- 
dence, and how many are willing to remain loyal to our gov- 
ernment. It is believed a large majority [etc.]. 2 

The same article even assumed an air of injured 
innocence and urged that as soon as the insurgent 
army laid down its arms 3 "the intentions of our govern- 

1 See Forum, vol. xxix., p. 403. 

2 These quotations are not taken from a scrap-book. Many readers 
forget that the bound volumes of all the great magazines are perma- 
nently available in the great libraries of the country. 

3 Hostilities had not yet broken out when the article now being con- 
sidered appeared on January 4th, and did not break out until thirty days 
later, to wit, on r ebruary 4th. 



Mac Arthur and the War 275 

ment will be made known by Congress." That was 
just thirteen years ago, and "the intentions of our 
government" have never yet been "made known by 
Congress, " despite the fact that the omission has all 
these years been like a buzzing insect, lighting inter- 
mittently on the sores of race prejudice and political 
difference in the Philippines, to say nothing of the 
circumstance that such omission leaves everybody 
guessing, including ourselves. The omission has been 
due to the fact that both the McKinley Administration 
which committed the original blunder of taking the 
islands, and the succeeding Administrations which have 
been the legatees of that blunder, have always needed 
in their Philippine business the support both of those 
whose votes are caught by the Denby honesty of 
1899 and those whose votes are caught by the Denby 
hypocrisy of 1900. 

War is a great silencer of hypocrisy. In the presence 
of real sorrow and genuine anger, it slinks away and is 
seen no more until more piping times. The lists of 
casualties had been duly bulletined to the United States 
from time to time between February, 1899, and June, 
1900, so that by the date last named it had become 
"good politics" to throw off the mask. Hence, at 
the Republican National Convention held in Phila- 
delphia June 19-21, 1900, we find that astute past- 
master of the science of government by parties, Senator 
Lodge, boldly throwing off the mask thus: 

We make no hypocritical pretense of being interested in 
the Philippines solely on account of others. We believe 
in trade expansion. 

Now the words of a United States Senator are much 
listened to by an army in the field. When a war breaks 
out, it is usually your Senator who gets your commission 



276 American Occupation of Philippines 

for you originally, and has you promoted and made 
captain, colonel, or general, as the case may be, if you 
do anything to deserve it, or lifted from the ranks 
to a commission, if you do anything to deserve it, or 
sees that something fitting is done if you die in any 
specially decent way. An army in the field thinks a 
United States Senator is about one of the biggest 
institutions going — which, seriously, is not far from the 
truth, with all due respect to the blase pessimists of the 
press gallery. Consider then how wholly uninspiring, 
as a sentiment to die by and kill by, the above senator- 
ial utterance was to the men in the field in the Philip- 
pines, who did not even then believe the islands would 
pay. The ' ' cold, hard, practical ' ' fact was, if the Senator 
was to be believed, that we were fighting for what is 
generically called "Wall Street;" that it was primarily 
a Wall Street war: an expedition fitted out to kill 
enough Filipinos to make the survivors good future 
customers — " Ultimate Consumers" — and only inci- 
dentally a war to make people follow your way of 
being happy in lieu of their own. Yet we had most of 
us, but shortly previously to that, gone trooping head- 
long to Cuba, in the wake of the most inspiring single 
personality of this age — Senator Lodge's friend, Colonel 
Roosevelt — some of our American thoraxes inflated 
with sentiments thus nobly expressed by the same dis- 
tinguished Senator in his speech on the resolution 
which declared war against Spain: 

"We are there" (meaning in the then Cuban situa- 
tion), Senator Lodge had said in the Senate, in the 
matchless outburst of eloquence with which he set the 
keynote to the war with Spain — 

We are there because we represent the spirit of liberty 
and the new time. * * * We have grasped no man's terri- 



MacArthur and the War 277 

tory, we have taken no man's property, we have invaded 
no man's rights. We do not ask their lands. x 

What difference, however, did it make to men under 
military orders, and that far away from home, where 
American public opinion could not and never can affect 
any given situation in time to help it, whether they were 
serving God or the devil? Everything disappeared 
but the primal fighting instinct. So the slaughter 
proceeded right merrily, at a ratio of about sixteen to 
one, and many a Filipino died with the word " Inde- 
pendence" on his lips, 2 while many an obscure American 
life went out, fighting under the Denby-Lodge dollar- 
mark flag of pseudo-trade expansion. Can you 
imagine a more thankless job? Do you wonder at 
the song that heads the chapter? Still, war is war, once 
you are in it. All through 1900 the volunteers of 1899 
kept on, cheerfully doing their country's work, not in 
the least hampered by whys or wherefores, so far as 
the quality of their work went. They knew that the 
Filipinos were not heathen, and they were not perfectly 
clear that they themselves were doing the Lord's work, 
unless "putting the fear of God into the heart of the 
insur recto" — one of their campaign expressions — was 
the Lord's work. However, if any of them gave any 
special thought to the ethics of the situation, this did 
not in the least affect their efficiency in action, nor 
their determination to lick the Filipino into submission. 
When the brief organized resistance of the insurgent 
armies in the field (February to November, 1899) 
underwent its transition to the far more formidable 
guerrilla tactics, they realized that they were "up 

1 Congressional Record, April 13, 1898, p. 3701. 

2 In the early days of the righting they used to hurrah a good deal, 
and shout "Viva la Independencia " (Live Independence). 



278 American Occupation of Philippines 

against" a long and tedious task, in which would be no 
special glamour, as there had been in Cuba, because the 
war was not much more popular at home than it was 
with them. The rank net hypocrisy of the whole 
situation, as they viewed it, is expressed in the song 
which heads this chapter. It is an answer to the Taft 
nonsense of 1900 about "the people long for peace and 
are willing to accept government under United States. " x 
That is why the Caribao Society do not sing it to Mr. 
Taft when he attends their annual banquet, notwith- 
standing that it is the star song of their repertoire. 2 
This statement of Judge Taft's, as well as other like 
statements of his which followed it during the presi- 
dential campaign of 1900, would have been perfectly 
harmless in home politics. It was made in the same 
spirit of optimism in which a Taft man will tell }^ou to- 
day, "The people are willing to see the Taft Adminis- 
tration endorsed. " But at that time in the Philippines 
there was no possible way to prove or disprove the 
statement to the satisfaction of anybody at home — or 
elsewhere, for that matter. And, under the circum- 
stances, it was at once a libel on Filipino patriotism and 
an ungracious belittling of the work of the American 
army. It was a libel on Filipino patriotism because it 
denied the loyal (even if ill-advised) unanimity of the 
Filipino people in their struggle for independence, and 
was a statement made recklessly, without knowledge, 
in aid of a presidential candidate in the United States. 
That it was highly inaccurate was well known to some 

1 See Judge Taft's cablegram to Secretary of War Root of August 21, 
1900, War Department Report, vol. i., pt. i, p. 80. 

3 The Caribao Society is an organization composed mainly of officers 
of the regular army, but to which any one who served as an officer, 
volunteer or regular, in the Philippine Insurrection, is eligible. Their 
principal function, like that of the famous Gridiron Club, is to give an 
annual dinner. 



MacArthur and the War 279 

70,000 American soldiers then in the field, who were 
daily getting insurrecto lead pumped into them, and 
also well known to their gallant commander, General 
MacArthur, who told Judge Taft just that thing. That 
it was an ungracious belittling of the work of the 
army is certainly obvious enough, and it was so con- 
sidered by the army, and its commanding general afore- 
said, who practically told Judge Taft just that thing. 
But Mr. Root, then Secretary of War, was as much 
interested in Mr. McKinley's re-election as Judge Taft 
was. So he spread the Taft cablegrams broadcast 
throughout the United States during the presidential 
campaign, and pigeonholed the MacArthur messages 
and reports on the situation in the dusty and innocuous 
desuetude of the War Department archives. Four 
years later at the Republican National Convention of 
1904, Mr. Root told the naked truth, thus: 

When the last national convention met, over 70,000 
soldiers from more than 500 stations held a still vigorous 
enemy in check. z 

The foregoing is all a record made and unalterable. 
It is a fair sample of the initial stages of one more of 
the experiments in colonization by a republic which 
are scattered through history and teach but one lesson. 
All the gentlemen concerned were personally men of 
high type. But look at the net result of their work. 
The impression it produced in the United States, at a 
tremendously critical period in the country's history, 
when the men at the helm of state were bending every 
energy to railroad the republic into a career of over- 

1 Addresses at Republican National Convention (1904), p. 62, pub- 
lished by Isaac H. Blanchard & Co., New York, 1904. The Republi- 
can National Convention of 1900 met June 19th, just sixteen days after 
the Taft Commission arrived at Manila. 



280 American Occupation of Philippines 

seas conquest, and using the army for that purpose, 
can be called by a short and ugly word. The splendor 
of Air. Root's intellect is positively alluring, but he is a 
dangerous man to republican institutions. Mr. Taft's 
part in that conspiracy for the suppression of the facts 
of the Philippine situation in 1900 was really due to 
kindliness of heart, regret at the war, and earnest hope 
that it would soon end. Mr. Denby's part was that 
of the out-and-out imperialist who has frank doubts in 
his own mind as to whether it is axiomatic, after all, 
that the form of government bequeathed us by our 
fathers is the best form of government yet devised. 
But the conspiracy was really a sin against the progress 
of the world, because it deceived the American people 
as to the genuineness and unanimity of the desire of the 
Filipino people to imitate the example set by us in 
1776, which has since served as a beacon-light of hope 
to so many people in so many lands in their several 
struggles to be free. 

By the spring of 1900, when General MacArthur 
relieved General Otis, the volunteers of 1899 had gotten 
thoroughly warmed up to the work of showing the 
Filipinos who was in fact " the boss of the show, " and by 
June, 1900, when Judge Taft arrived, they had gotten 
still warmer 1 ; and in General Otis's successor they had a 
commander who understood his men thoroughly, and 
was determined to carry out honestly, with firmness, 
and without playing, as his predecessor had done, the 
role of political henchman, the purpose for which the 
army he commanded had been sent to the Islands 
to accomplish. In this state of the case, the Taft 
Commission came out. 

This would seem rather an odd point at which to 

1 General MacArthur relieved General Otis May 5, 1900, and the 
Taft Commission arrived at Manila June 3d thereafter. 



MacArthur and the War 281 

terminate a chapter on " MacArthur and the War," 
seeing that General MacArthur continued to command 
the American forces in the Philippines and to direct 
their strenuous field operations until July, 1901, more 
than a year later, when he was relieved by General 
Chaffee, on whom thereafter devolved the subsequent 
conduct of the war. But we must follow the inexorable 
thread of chronological order, and so yield the centre 
of the stage from June, 1900, on, to Mr. Taft, else the 
resultant net confusion of ideas about the American 
occupation of the Philippines might remain as great as 
that which this narrative is an attempt in some degree 
to correct. 

All through the official correspondence of 1899 and 
1900 between the Adjutant-General of the Army, 
General Corbin, and General Otis at Manila, one sees 
Mr. McKinley's sensitiveness to public opinion. "In 
view of the impatience of the people" you will do thus 
and so, is a typical sample of this feature of that cor- 
respondence. l Troubled, possibly, with misgivings, as 
to whether, after all, in view of the vigorous and un- 
deniably obstinate struggle for independence the 
Filipinos were putting up, it would not have been wiser 
to have done with them as we had done in the case of 
Cuba, and troubled, beyond the perad venture of a 
doubt, about the effect of the possible Philippine situa- 
tion on the fortunes of his party and himself in the 
approaching campaign for the presidency, Mr. McKin- 
ley sent Mr. Taft out, in the spring preceding the election 
of 1900, to help General MacArthur run the war. 
We must now, therefore, turn our attention to Mr. 
Taft, not forgetting General MacArthur in so doing. 

1 Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1051. 



CHAPTER XIV 
The Taft Commission 

The papers 'id it 'andsome, 
But you bet the army knows. 

Kipling, Ballad of the Boer War. 

THE essentials of the situation which confronted the 
Taft Commission on its arrival in the islands in 
June, 1900, and the mental attitude in which they 
approached that situation, may now be briefly summar- 
ized, with entire confidence that such summary will 
commend itself as fairly accurate to the impartial 
judgment both of the historian of the future and of any 
candid contemporary mind. 

It is not necessary to "vex the dull ear" of a mighty 
people much engrossed with their own affairs, by 
repetition of any further details concerning the original 
de facto alliance between Admiral Dewey and Aguinaldo. 
Suffice it to remind a people whose saving grace is a 
love of fair play, that, after the battle of Manila Bay, 
when Admiral Dewey brought Aguinaldo down from 
Hong Kong to Cavite, both the Admiral and his 
Filipino allies were keenly cognizant of the national 
purpose set forth in the declaration of war against Spain, 
and that the Filipinos could not have been expected to 
make any substantial distinction between the casual 
remarks of a victorious admiral on the quarter-deck 
of his flagship in May, remarks concurrent and con- 

282 



The Taft Commission 283 

sistent with actual treatment of the Filipinos as allies, 
and the imperious commands of a general ashore in 
December thereafter, acting under specific orders pur- 
suant to the Treaty of Paris. The one great fact of the 
situation, "as huge as high Olympus," they did grasp, 
viz., that both were representatives of America on the 
ground at the time of their respective utterances, and 
that one in December in effect repudiated without a 
word of explanation what the other had done from May 
to August. They had helped us to take the city of 
Manila in August, and, to use the current phrase of the 
passing hour, coined in this period of awakening of the 
national conscience to a proper attitude toward double- 
dealing in general, they felt that they had been "given 
the double cross." In other words they believed that 
the American Government had been guilty of a dupli- 
city rankly Machiavellian. And that was the cause of 
the war. 

We have seen in the chapters on "The Benevolent 
Assimilation Proclamation" and "The Iloilo Fiasco" 
that, in the Philippines at any rate, no matter how melli- 
fluously pacific it may have sounded at home — no matter 
how soothing to the troubled doubts of the national 
conscience — the Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation 
of December 21,1 898, was recognized both by the Eighth 
Army Corps and by Aguinaldo's people as a call to 
arms — a signal to the former to get ready for the work of 
"civilizing with a Krag"; a signal to the latter to gird 
up their loins for the fight to the death for government 
of their people, by their people, for their people; and 
that the yearning benevolence of said proclamation 
was calculated strikingly to remind the Filipinos of 
Spain's previous traditional yearnings for the welfare 
of Cuba, indignantly cut short by us — yearnings "to 
spare the great island from the danger of premature 



284 American Occupation of Philippines 

independence" 1 which that decadent monarchy could 
not even help repeating in the swan-song wherein she 
sued to President McKinley for peace. We did not 
realize the absoluteness of the analogy then. It is all 
clear enough now. We can now understand how and 
why Mr. McKinley' s programme of Annexation and 
Benevolent Assimilation of 1898-9, blindly earnest as 
was his belief that it would make the Filipino people at 
once cheerfully forego the " legitimate aspirations" 
to which we ourselves had originally given a momentum 
so generous that nothing but bullets could then possibly 
have stopped it, was in fact received by them in a 
manner compared with which Canada's response in 
191 1 to Speaker Champ Clark's equally benevolent 
suggestion of United States willingness to accord to 
Canada also, gradual Benevolent Assimilation and 
Ultimate Annexation, was one great sisterly sob of 
sheer joy as at the finding of a long lost brother. From 
the arrival of the American troops on June 30, 1898, 
until the outbreak of February 4, 1899, there had been 
two armies camped not far from each other, one born 
of the idea of independence and bent upon it, the other 
at first groping in the dark without instructions, and 
finally instructed to deny independence. There was 
never any faltering or evasion on the part of Aguinaldo 
and his people. They knew what they wanted and 
said so on all occasions. At all times and in all places 
they made it clear, by proclamation, by letter, by con- 
versation, and otherwise, that independence was the 
one thing to which, whether they were fit for it or not, 
they had pledged "their lives, their fortunes, and their 
sacred honor." 

1 Letter of July 22, 1898, by Due d'Almodovar del Rio, Prime Minister 
of Spain, to President McKinley, suing for peace. Senate Document 
62, pt. 1, 55th Congress, 3d Session, pp. 272-3. 



The Taft Commission 285 

We have seen how easily the war itself could have 
been averted by the Bacon Resolution of January, 1899, 
or some similar resolution frankly declaring the purpose 
of our government ; how here was Senator Bacon at this 
end of the line pleading with his colleagues to be frank, 
and to make a declaration in keeping with "the high 
purpose" for which we had gone to war with Spain, in- 
stead of holding on to the Philippines on the idea that 
they might prove a second Klondike, while justifying 
such retention by arbitrarily assuming, without any 
knowledge whatever on the subject, that the Filipinos 
were incapable of self-government; how, there, at the 
other end of the line, at Manila, Aguinaldo's Commis- 
sioners, familiar with our Constitution and the history 
and traditions of our government, were making, sub- 
stantially, though in more diplomatic language, pre- 
cisely the same plea, and imploring General Otis' s 
Commissioners to give them some assurance which 
would quiet the apprehensions of their people, and calm 
the fear that the original assurance, "We are going 
to lick the Spaniards and set you free, " was now about 
to be ignored because the islands might be profitable 
to the United States. 

We have seen the war itself, as far as it had progressed 
by June, 1900, one of the bitterest wars in history, 
punctuated by frequent barbarities avenged in kind, 
and how, if the Taft Commission had not come out with 
McKinley spectacles on, they would have seen the 
picture of a bleeding, prostrate, and deeply hostile 
people, still bent on fighting to the last ditch, not only 
animated by a feeling against annexation by us similar 
to that the Canadians would have to-day if we should 
also try the Benevolent Assimilation game on them — 
first with proclamations breathing benevolence and 
then with cannon belching grape-shot — but further 



286 American Occupation of Philippines 

animated by the instinctive as well as inherited know- 
ledge common to all colored peoples, whether red, yellow 
brown, or black, that wheresoever white men and 
colored live in the same country together, there the white 
man will rule. Understand, this was before Judge Taft 
had had a chance to assure them, with the kindly Taft 
smile and the hearty Taft hand-shake, that their 
benevolent new masters were going to reverse the 
verdict of the ages, and treat them with a fraternal 
love wholly free from race prejudice. If Judge Taft 
could only have arrived in January, 1899, and told 
them that the Bacon Resolution really represented the 
spirit of the attitude of the American people toward 
them, then the finely commanding bearing of Mr. Taft, 
and the noble genuineness of his desire to see peace on 
earth and goodwill toward men, might even have 
prevented the war. But this is merely what might 
have been. What actually was, when he did arrive, 
in June, 1900, was that the milk of human kindness had 
long since been spilled, and his task was to gather it up 
and put it back in the pail. When I, a Southern man 
who have taken part in the only two wars this nation 
has had in my lifetime, reflect that in this year of 
grace, 1912, Mr. Underwood's otherwise matchless 
availability as the candidate of his party for President 
is questioned on the idea that it might be a tactical 
blunder, because of "the late war," which broke out 
before either Mr. Underwood or myself were born, I 
cannot share the Taft optimism as to the rapidity with 
which the scars of "the late war" in the Philippines 
will heal, and as to the affectionate gratitude toward the 
United States with which the McKinley-Taft pro- 
gramme of Benevolent Assimilation will presently be 
regarded by the people of the Philippine Islands. 
We have seen the futile efforts of the Schurman 



The Taft Commission 287 

Commission of 1899, sent out that spring, in deference 
to American public opinion, with definite instructions 
to try and patch up a peace, by talking to the leading 
spirics of a war for independence, now in full swing, 
about the desirability of benevolent leading-strings. 
" They [meaning the Schurman Commission] had come," 
says Mr. McKinley, in his annual message to Congress 
of December 5, 1899, z "with the hope of co-operating 
with Admiral Dewey and General Otis in establishing 
peace and order." They came, they saw, they went, 
recognizing the futility of the errand on which they had 
been sent. And now came the Taft Commission a year 
later, on precisely the same errand, after the Filipinos 
had sunk all their original petty differences and jealous- 
ies in a very reasonable instinctive common fear of 
economic exploitation, and a very unreasonable but, 
to them, very real common fear of race elimination, 
amounting to terror, and been welded into absolute 
oneness — if that were somewhat lacking before — in the 
fierce crucible of sixteen months of bloody fighting 
against a foreign foe for the independence of their com- 
mon country. President McKinley's message to Con- 
gress of December, 1899, is full of the old insufferable 
drivel, so grossly, though unwittingly, ungenerous to 
our army then in the field in the Philippines, about the 
triviality of the resistance we were "up against. " The 
message in one place blandly speaks of "the peaceable 
and loyal majority who ask nothing better than to 
accept our authority, " in another of "the sinister 
ambitions of a few selfish Filipinos." Thus was out- 
lined, in the message announcing the purpose to send 
out the Taft Commission, the view that no real funda- 
mental resistance existed in the islands. Basing con- 
templated action on this sort of stuff, the presidential 
1 See Congressional Record of that date, p. 33. 



288 American Occupation of Philippines 

message outlines the presidential purpose as follows — 
this in December, 1899, mind you: 

There is no reason why steps should not be taken from 
time to time to inaugurate governments essentially popular 
in their form as fast as territory is held and controlled by 
our troops. 

Then follows the genesis of the idea which resulted 
in the Taft Commission : 

To this end I am considering the advisability of the return 
[to the islands] of the commission [the Schurman Commis- 
sion] or such of the members thereof as can be secured. 

In Cuba, General Wood began the work of recon- 
struction at Havana with a central government and 
the best men he could get hold of, and acted through 
them, letting his plans and purposes percolate down- 
ward to the masses of the people. Not so in the 
Philippines. Reconstruction there was to begin by 
establishing municipal governments, to be later followed 
by provincial governments, and finally by a central 
one ; in other words, by placing the waters of self-govern- 
ment at the bottom of the social fabric among the most 
ignorant people, and letting them percolate up, accord- 
ing to some mysterious law of gravitation apparently 
deemed applicable to political physics. Of course, 
these poor people simply always took their cue from 
their leaders, knowing nothing themselves that could 
affect the success of this project except that we were 
their enemies and that they might get knocked in the 
head if they did not play the game. ' ' I have believed, 
says Mr. McKinley, in his message to Congress of 
December, 1899, "that reconstruction should not begin 
by the establishment of one central civil government 
for all the islands, with its seat at Manila, but rather 



The Taft Commission 289 

that the work should be commenced by building up 
from the bottom." Whereat, the young giant America 
bowed, in puzzled hope, and worldly-wise old Europe 
smiled, in silent but amused contempt. 

If at the time he formulated this scheme for their 
government Mr. McKinley had known anything about 
the Philippines, or the Filipinos, he would have known 
that what he so suavely called " building from the 
bottom" was like trying to make water run up hill, 
i. e., like starting out to have ideas percolate upward, so 
that through "the masses" the more intelligent people 
might be redeemed. The " nigger in the woodpile" 
lay in the words " essentially popular in form." Of 
course no government by us "essentially popular" was 
possible at the time. But a government "popular in 
form" would sound well to the American people, and, 
if they could be kept quiet until after the presidential 
election of 1900, maybe the supposed misunderstanding 
on the part of the Filipinos of the benevolence of our 
intentions might be corrected by kindness. According- 
ly, the following spring, cotemporaneously with General 
Otis's final departure from Manila to the United States, 
in which free country he might say the war was over as 
much as he pleased without being molested with round- 
robins by Bob Collins, O. K. Davis, John McCutcheon, 
and the rest of those banes of his insular career, who so 
pestiferously insisted that the American public ought 
to know the facts, the Taft Commission was sent out, 
to "aid" General MacArthur, as the Schurman Com- 
mission had "aided" General Otis. 1 

It would seem fairly beyond any reasonable doubt 

1 General Otis's appreciation of such "aid" was thus expressed in his 
cablegram to Washington of June 4, 1899: "Negotiations and confer- 
ences with insurgents cost soldiers' lives and prolong our difficulties. " 
Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1002. 



290 American Occupation of Philippines 

that the official information the Taft Commission were 
given by President McKinley concerning the state of 
public order they would find in the islands on arrival 
was in keeping with the information solemnly imparted 
to Congress by him in December thereafter, which was 
as follows: u By the spring of this year (1900) the effec- 
tive opposition of the dissatisfied Tagals" — always the 
same minimization of the task of the army as a sop 
to the American conscience — "was virtually ended." 
Then follows a glowing picture of how the Filipinos 
are going to love us after we rescue them from the hated 
Tagal, but with this circumspect reservation: "He 
would be rash who, with the teachings of contemporary 
history, would fix a limit " as to how long it will take to 
produce such a state of affairs. Looking at that mighty 
panorama of events from the dispassionate standpoint 
now possible, it seems to me that Mr. McKinley's whole 
Philippine policy of 1899- 1900 was animated by the 
belief that the more the Philippine situation should 
resemble the really identical Cuban one in the estima- 
tion of the American people, the more likely his Phil- 
ippine policy was to be repudiated at the polls in the 
fall of 1900. The Taft Commission left Washington* 
for Manila in the spring of 1900, after their final 
conference with the President who had appointed them 
and was a candidate for re-election in the coming fall, as 
completely committed as circumstances can commit 
any man or set of men to the programme of occupation 
which was to follow the subjugation of the inhabitants, 
and to the proposition of present incapacity for self- 
government, its corner-stone; to say nothing of the 
embarrassment felt at Washington by reason of having 
stumbled into a bloody war with people whom we 
honestly wanted to help, had never seen, and had 
nothing but the kindliest feelings for. While the serene 



The Taft Commission 291 

and capacious intellect of William H. Taft was still 
pursuing the even tenor of its way in the halls of justice 
(as United States Circuit Judge for the 8th Circuit), the 
Philippine programme was formulated at Washington. 
Judge Taft went to Manila to make the best of a situa- 
tion which he had not created, to write the lines of the 
Deus ex machina for a Tragedy of Errors up to that 
point composed wholly by others. It has been fre- 
quently stated and generally believed that when Mr. 
McKinley sent for him and proposed the Philippine 
mission, Judge Taft replied, substantially: "Mr. 
President, I am not the man for the place. / don't 
want the Philippines.' 11 To which Mr. McKinley is 
supposed to have replied: "You are the man for the 
place, Judge. I had rather have a man out there who 
does n't want them. " The point of the original story 
lay in what Mr. McKinley said. The point of the 
repetition of it here lies in what Mr. Taft said, the in- 
ference therefrom being that he did not think the true 
interests of his country "wanted" them, and that had 
he been called into President McKinley 's council sooner 
he would have so advised ; an inference warranted by 
his subsequent admission that "we blundered into 
colonization." 1 

It is utterly fatal to clear thinking on this great 
subject, which concerns the liberties of a whole people, 
to treat Judge Taft's reports as Commissioner to, and 
later Governor of, the Philippines as in the nature of a 
judicial decision on the capacity of the Filipinos for 
self-government. When he consented to go out there, 
he went, not to review the findings of the Paris Peace 
Commission, but at the urgent solicitation of an Admin- 

1 Address by Secretary of War Taft before the National Geographic 
Society at Washington, published in the official organ of that Society, 
National Geographic Magazine for August, 1905. 



292 American Occupation of Philippines 

istration whose fortunes were irrevocably committed 
to those findings, including the express finding that they 
were unfit for self-government, and the implied one 
that we must remain to improve the condition of the 
inhabitants. He was thus not a judge come out to 
decide on the fitness of the people for self-government, 
but an advocate to make the best possible case for their 
unfitness, and its corollary, the necessity to remain 
indefinitely, just as England has remained in Egypt. 
The war itself convinced the whole army of the United 
States that Aguinaldo would have been the "Boss of the 
Show" had Dewey sailed away from Manila after 
sinking the Spanish fleet. The war satisfied us all that 
Aguinaldo would have been a small edition of Porfirio 
Diaz, and that the Filipino republic-that-might-have- 
been would have been, very decidedly, "a going con- 
cern," although Aguinaldo probably would have been 
able to say with a degree of accuracy, as Diaz might 
have said in Mexico for so many years, "The Republic? 
I am the Republic. " The war demonstrated to the /L 
army, to a Q. E. D., that the Filipinos are "capable of 
self-government," unless the kind which happens to 
suit the genius of the American people is the only kind 
of government on earth that is respectable, and the one 
panacea for all the ills of government among men 
without regard to their temperament or historical ante- 
cedents. The educated patriotic Filipinos can control 
the masses of the people in their several districts as 
completely as a captain ever controlled a company. 1 
While the municipal officials of the McKinley-Taft 
municipal kindergarten were stumbling along with the 

1 Says General Chaffee in his annual report for 1902: "The intelligent 
element controlled the ignorant masses as perfectly as ever a captain 
controlled the men of his company." War Department Report, 1902, 
vol. ix., p. 191. 



The Taft Commission 293 

strange new town government system imported from 
America, and atoning to their benignant masters for 
mistakes by writing them letters about how benig- 
nant they — the teachers — were, they — the pupils, — 
according to the contemporaneous description by the 
commanding general of the United States forces in the 
islands, were running a superbly efficient municipal 
system throughout the whole archipelago, "simultane- 
ously and in the same sphere as the American govern- 
ments, and in many instances through the same 
personnel," 3 in aid of the insurrection. General Mac- 
Arthur humorously adds that the town officials "acted 
openly in behalf of the Americans and secretly in behalf 
of the insurgents, and, with considerable apparent solici- 
tude for the interest of both. " In short, the war at once 
demonstrated their "capacity for self-government" and 
made granting it to them for the time being unthinkable. 
For the war was fought not on the issue of the capacity, 
but on the issue of the granting. The Treaty of Paris 
settled the "capacity" part. The army in 1898, 1899, 
and 1900 can hardly be said to have had any much 
more decided opinion on the capacity branch of the 
subject, than Perry did about the Japanese in 1854. 
The Paris Peace Commission having solemnly decided 
the "capacity part" adversely to the Filipinos and the 
war having followed, thereafter Mr. Taft went out to 
make out the best case possible in support of the action 
of the Peace Commission and, ex vi termini, in support 
of everything made necessary b}^ the fact of the pur- 
chase. Unless some one goes out to present to the 
American people the other side of the case, they will 
never arrive at a just verdict. 

Committed, a priori, to the task of squaring the 
McKinley Administration with its course as to Cuba, 

1 War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 61. 



294 American Occupation of Philippines 

the only course possible for the Taft Commission was to 
set up a benevolent government based upon the incom- 
petency of the governed, which, being a standing affront 
to the intelligence of the people, earns their hatred, how- 
ever it may crave their love. By the very bitterness of 
the opposition it permits yet disregards, it binds itself 
ever more irrevocably to remain a benevolent engenderer 
of malevolence. Government and governed thus get 
wider apart as the years go by, and, the raison d'etre of 
the former being the mental deficiencies of the latter, 
it must, in self-defence, assert those deficiencies the 
more offensively, the more vehemently they are denied. 
What hope therefore can there be that the light that 
shone upon Saul on the road to Damascus will ever 
break upon the President? What hope that he will 
ever re-attune his ears to the voice of the Declaration of 
Independence, calling down from where the Signers 
(we hope without untoward exception) have gone, 
crying: " William, William, why persecutest thou me? 
it is hard for thee to kick against the right of a people 
to pursue happiness in their own way"} The difference 
between the President and the writer is that both went 
out to scoff and the latter remained — much longer — to 
pray. 

The Taft Commission arrived at Manila on June 3, 
1900, loaded to the guards with kindly belief in the stale 
falsehood wherewith General Otis, ably assisted by his 
press censor, had been systematically soothing Mr. 
McKinley's and the general American conscience during 
the whole twenty months he had commanded the 
Eighth Army Corps, x viz., that the insurrection was due 
solely to "the sinister ambitions of a few selfish leaders, " 
and did not represent the wishes of the whole people. 
It is true that the insurrection originally started under 

1 August 29, 1898, to May 5, 1900. 



The Taft Commission 295 

Admiral Dewey's auspices and under the initial protec- 
tion of his puissant guns was headed by a group of men 
most of whom, including Aguinaldo, were Tagalos. 
But all Filipinos look alike, the whole seven or eight 
millions of them. They differ from one another not one 
whit more than one Japanese differs from another. And 
they all feel alike on most things, x because they all have 
the same customs, tastes, and habits of thought. Said 
Governor Taft to the Senate Committee in 1902: 

While it is true that there are a number of Christian 
''tribes," so-called, — I do not know the number, possibly 
eight or ten, or twelve, — -that speak different languages, 
there is a homogeneity in the people in appearance, in 
habits, and in many avenues of thought. To begin with, 
they are Catholics.'" 2 

Certainly this should forever crucify the stale slander, 
still ignorantly repeated in the United States at inter- 
vals, which seeks to make the American people think the 
great body of the Filipino people are still in a tribal 
state, ethnologically. 3 A Tagalo leader is about as 
much a " tribal" leader as is a Tammany "brave" of 
Irish antecedents. In fact there is much in common 
between the two. Both are clannish. Both have a 
genius for organization that is simply superb. Both 
are irrepressible about Home Rule. Countless genera- 
tions ago the Filipinos were lifted by the Spanish 
priests out of the tribal state, and the educated people 
all speak Spanish. But the original tribal dialects, 
which the Spanish priests patiently mastered and finally 
reduced for them to a written language, still survive in 

1 Especially independence. 

2 Senate Document jji (1902), pt. 1, page 50 

3 A slander ignorantly repeated by the adverse report of the minority 
of the Insular Affairs Committee of the House, on the Jones Bill, intro- 
duced in March, 19 12, proposing ultimate independence in 192 1. 



296 American Occupation of Philippines 

the several localities of their origin. So that every 
Filipino of a well-to-do family is brought up speaking 
two languages, Spanish, and the local dialect of his 
native place, which is the only language known to the 
poorer natives of the same neighborhood. Surely even 
the valor of ignorance can see that we are presumptu- 
ously seeking to reverse the order of God and nature 
in assuming that an alien race can lead a people out of 
the wilderness better than could a government by the 
leading men of their own race to whom the less favored 
look with an ardent pride that would be a guarantee 
of loyal and inspiring co-operation. You can beat a 
balking horse to death but you cannot make him wag 
his tail, or otherwise indicate contentment or a disposi- 
tion to cordial co-operation which will make for pro- 
gress. Mr. Bryan has visited the Philippines, and his 
evidence is simply cumulative of mine, as mine, based 
on six years' acquaintance with the Filipinos, is simply 
cumulative of Admiral Dewey's testimony of 1898, so 
often cited hereinbefore, and of the opinion of Hon. 
George Curry, a Republican member of Congress from 
New Mexico who served eight years in the Philippines, 
and believes they can safely be given their independ- 
ence by 192 1. Mr. Bryan says: 

So far as their own internal affairs are concerned, they 
do not need to be subject to any alien government. 

He further says : 

There is a wide difference, it is true, between the general 
intelligence of the educated Filipino and the laborer on the 
street and in the field, but this is not a barrier to self-govern- 
ment. Intelligence controls in every government, except 
where it is suppressed by military force. Nine tenths of the 
Japanese have no part in the law-making. In Mexico, the 
gap between the educated classes and the peons is fully as 



The Taft Commission 297 

great as, if not greater than, the gap between the extremes 
of Filipino society. Those who question the capacity of the 
Filipinos for self-government forget that patriotism raises up 
persons fitted for the work that needs to be done. " x 



It is because I believe that in the Philippines we are 
doing ourselves an injustice and keeping back the 
progress of the world by depreciating and scoffing at 
the value of patriotism as a factor in self-government 
and in the maintenance of free institutions, that I have 
written this book. There is no more patriotic people 
in the world than the Filipino people. I base this opin- 
ion upon an intimate knowledge of them, and in the light 
of considerable observation throughout most of Europe, 
and in Asia from the Golden Horn to the mouth of the 
Yang-tse. Woe to the nonsense, sometimes ignorant, 
sometimes vicious, wherewith we are regaled from time to 
time by Americans who go to Manila, smoke a cigar or 
two in some American club there, and then come back 
home and depreciate the Filipino people without at 
least correcting Col. Roosevelt's wholly uninformed and 
cruel random assertions of 1900 about the Filipinos 
being a " jumble of savage tribes, " and about Aguinaldo 
being "the Osceola of the Filipinos," or their "Sitting 
Bull!" It is wonderfully inspiring to turn from such 
stale slander to Mr. Bryan's above statement of the 
case for our Oriental subjects, a statement framed in 
his own infinitely sympathetic and inimitable way, 
which says for me just what I had long wanted to ex- 
press, but could not, so well. And in the midst of the 
recurring slander that the Filipino people are "a 
heterogeneous lot, " it is refreshing to find in a preface 
to the American Census of the Philippines of 1903, by 
the Director thereof, a passage where, in comparing the 

1 See The Commoner, April 27, 1906. 



298 American Occupation of Philippines 

tables of that census with those of the Twelfth Census 
of the United States, he says : 

"Those of the Philippine Census are somewhat simpler, 
the differences being due mainly to the more homogeneous 
character of the population of the Philippine Islands. Ml 

When we consider the above in the light of the past 
and present operation of our own immigration laws, it 
is not flattering, but it may and should tend to awaken 
some realization of the manifold nature and blinding 
effects of current misapprehensions in the United States 
concerning the inhabitants of the Philippines. One 
Filipino does not differ from another any more than one 
American does from another American — in fact they 
differ less, considering immigration. The Filipino people 
are not rendered a heterogeneous lot by having three 
different languages, Ilocano, Tagalo, and Visayan, 2 
which are respectively the languages spoken in the 
northern, the central, and the southern part of their 
country, any more than the people of Switzerland are 
rendered heterogeneous by the circumstance that in 
northern Switzerland you find German spoken for the 
most part, while farther south you find French, and near 
the southernmost extremities some Italian. At this late 
date no credible person acquainted with the facts will 
be so poor in spirit as to deny that the motives of the 
men who originally started the insurrection were patri- 
otic. Nor will any one who served under General 
Otis's command in the Philippines deny that that emi- 
nent desk soldier continued to cling to his early theory 
that it was a purely Tagalo insurrection long after the 
deadly unanimity of the opposition had seeped, with 

1 Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 9. 

2 These are the three main lines of cleavage, linguistically speaking. 
Nearly all the minor dialects are kin to some one of the principal three. 



The Taft Commission 299 

all-pervading thoroughness, into the general mind of 
the army of occupation. The white flag or rag of truce, 
alias treachery, used to be hoisted to put us off our 
guard in pretence of welcome to our columns approach- 
ing their towns and barrios. Such use of such a flag, 
followed by treachery, the ultimate weapon of the weak, 
had been in turn followed, with relentless impartiality 
in countless instances, by due unloosening of the vials 
of American wrath, until every nipa shack 1 in the 
Philippine Islands that remained unbumed had had its 
lesson, written in the blood of its occupants or their kin, 
to the tune of the Krag-Jorgensen or the Gat ling. Yet 
General Otis's reports are always bland, and always 
convey the idea of an insurrection exclusively Tagalo. 

In the summer of 1900, the newly arrived civilians, 
the Taft Commission, had no special interest in the 
soldiers who, for better, for worse, were "doing their 
country's work," as Kipling calls his own country's 
countless wars against its refractory subjects in the far 
East ; and no especial sympathy with that work. Two 
years later we find President Roosevelt, in connection 
with the general amnesty of July 4, 1902, congratulating 
his "bowld lads," as Mr. Dooley would call them — 
meaning General Chaffee and the Eighth Army Corps — 
on a total of "two thousand combats, great and small" 
up to that time, but you never find in any of Governor 
Taft's Philippine state papers any more affirmative 
recognition of continued resistance to American rule 
than some mild allusion to "small but hard knocks" 
being administered here and there by the army. 
From the beginning there was a systematic belittling, 
on the part of the Taft Commission, of the work of the 
army, incidentally to belittling the reality and unan- 

1 Peasant's hut, usually of bamboo, thatched with stout straw {nipa). 
It is the log cabin of the Philippines. 



300 American Occupation of Philippines 

imity of the opposition which was daily calling it forth. " 
This was not vicious. It was essentially benevolent. 
It was part of the initial fermentation of their precon- 
ceived theory. But the trouble about their theory was 
that it was only a theory. It would not square with the 
facts. They were trying to square the subjugation of 
the Philippines with the freeing of Cuba, a task quite as 
soluble as the squaring of a circle. They hoped, with 
all the kindly benevolence of Mr. McKinley himself, 
that the opposition to our rule was not as great as some 
people seemed to think. They had come out to the 
islands earnestly wishing to find conditions not as bad 
as they had been asserted to be. And the wish became 
father to the thought and the thought soon found 
expression in words — cablegrams to the United States 
presenting an optimistic view as to the prospects of 
necessity for further shedding of blood in the interest of 
Benevolent Assimilation, alias Trade Expansion. Some 
flippant person will say, "That is a polite way of charg- 
ing insincerity. ' ' This book is not addressed to flippant 
persons. It is a serious attempt to deal with a problem 
involving the liberties of a whole people, and will be, 
as far as the writer can make it, straightforward, digni- 
fied, and candid. Judge Taft's fearful mistake of 1900- 
190 1 in the matter of his premature planting of the 
civil government — a mistake because based on the idea 
that "the great majority of the people" welcomed 
American rule, and a fearful mistake because fraught 

1 By way of protest against this kind of belittling of the army's work, 
General MacArthur says in his annual report (War Dept. Rept., 1900, 
vol. i., pt. 5, p. 60), "Such a narrow statement of the case is unfair to 
the service," adding a handsome tribute, which might have come very 
graciously from the Commission had it felt so disposed, to "the endur- 
ance, fortitude, and valor" of his 70,000 men during the precise period 
while the Commission was filling the American papers with politically 
opportune nonsense about "Peace, peace," when there was no peace. 



The Taft Commission 301 

with so much subsequent sacrifice of life due to too 
early withdrawal of the police protection of the army — 
was not the first instance in American history where an 
ordinarily level-headed public man has, with egregious 
folly, mistaken the mood and temper of a whole people. 
The key to his mistake lay in the fact that, coming into 
a strange country in the midst of a war, he ignored the 
advice of the commanding general of the army of his 
country concerning the military situation, and took the 
advice of a few native Tories, or Copperheads, of wealth, 
who had never really been in sympathy with the insur- 
rection and who, flocking about him as soon as he 
arrived, told him what he so longed to be told, viz., that 
the war did not represent the wishes of the people but 
was kept up by "a conspiracy of assassination" of all 
who did not contribute to it either in service or money. 
He thereupon decided that the men who told him this 
realty represented the voice of the people, and that the 
men in the field who had then been keeping up the 
struggle for independence for sixteen months, in season 
and out of season, were simply "a Mafia on a very 
large scale." Consequently the Taft Commission had 
been in the islands less than three months when 
Secretary of War Root at Washington was giving 
the widest possible publicity to cablegrams from them, 
such as that dated August 21, 1900, mentioned in 
the preceding chapter, conveying the glad tidings 
that "large number of people long for peace and 
are willing to accept government under United States " x ; 
and by November next thereafter, the " large num- 
ber" had grown to "a great majority," and the 
"willing" to "entirely willing." The November 
statement was: 

1 See Report of Secretary of War Root for 1900. War Department 
Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 1, p. 80. 



302 American Occupation of Philippines 

A great majority of the people long for peace and are 
entirely willing to accept the establishment of a government 
under the supremacy of the United States. 1 

Yet, as we saw in the preceding chapter, the real 
situation in the Philippines at this very time was 
described four years later at the Republican National 
Convention of 1904 by Mr. Root thus: 

When the last national convention met, over 70,000 
American soldiers from more than 500 stations held a still 
vigorous enemy in check. 

Between the date of their arrival in the Islands on 
June 3d, and the date of this August 21st telegram, the 
Taft Commission did little junketing, but remained in 
Manila imbibing the welcome views of the ''Tories" or 
"Copperheads," and seeking very little information 
from the army. But it so happens that the Adjutant- 
General at Manila used to keep a record of the daily 
engagements during that period, which record was later 
published in the annual War Department Report, 2 and 
it shows a total of about five hundred killings (of Fili- 
pinos) between June 3d, and August 21st, to say nothing 
of probably many times that number hit but not killed, 
and therefore able to get away. (You could not include 
any Filipino in your returns of your killings except dead 
you had actually counted.) It also happens that on 
June 4th, the day after Judge Taft's arrival, General 
MacArthur, in response to an order from Washington 
sent some time previous at the instance of Congress, had 
all the Filipino casualties our military records showed 
up to that time (i. e., during the sixteen months from 
the day of the outbreak, February 4, 1899, to June 3, 
1900), tabulated and totalled, and the total Filipino 

1 See Report of Taft Philippine Commission of iqoo, p. 17. 

2 War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, pp. 34-42. 



The Taft Commission 3°3 

killed accordingly reported by cablegram to the War 
Department on June 4, 1900, was 10,78c 1 

Ten thousand in sixteen months is 625 per month. 
So that by the time Judge Taft arrived, the Filipinos 
had been sufficiently beaten into submission to decrease 
the death-rate due to the Independence Bug from 
something over six hundred per month to about two 
hundred per month. Judge Taft called this en- 
thusiasm. I call it exhaustion. Whereupon, exclaims 
a Boston Anti-Imperialist, "Why don't you issue Mr. 
Taft a certificate as a member of the Ananias Club at 
once, and be done with it?" My answer is that I do 
not believe the Taft Commission in 1900 either knew 
these figures or wanted to know them. They came out 
preaching a Gospel of Hope to the exclusion of all else, a 
species of mental healing. They said, soothingly to 
Dame Filipina, "Be not afraid; you are well; you are 
well ' ' — of the desire for independence she had conceived, 
when what that lady needed was the surgical operation 
indispensable for the removal of a still-born child. 

The will of the American people is ascertainable, and 
quadrennially announced, through certain prescribed 
methods. And (nearly) everybody takes the result 
good-humoredly, God bless our country, whatever the 
result. But just how Mr. Taft and his colleagues 
could assume to speak for the "great majority" of the 
Filipino people at the tremendous juncture in their 
destinies now under consideration during the Presiden- 
tial election of 1900, does not clearly appear, except that 
in their first report they say : 

Many witnesses were examined as to the form of govern- 
ment best adapted to these islands and satisfactory to the 
people , 2 

1 5. D. 435, 56th Cong, ist Sess. 

2 Report U. S. Philippine Commission, November, 1900, p. 15. 



304 American Occupation of Philippines 

a statement which obviously takes for granted the 
only point involved in the war, viz., whether any kind 
of alien government would be "satisfactory to the 
people. " And in their various other communications 
to Washington they describe themselves, with no small 
degree of benevolent satisfaction, as enthusiastically 
received by natives not under arms at the moment of 
such reception. As a matter of fact, a carpet-bag 
governor of Georgia might just as well have reported 
to Andrew Johnson an enthusiastic reception at the 
hands of the people whose homes had lately been put to 
the torch, and their kith and kin to the sword, while the 
whole fair face of nature from Atlanta to the sea lay 
bruised and bleeding under the iron heel of Sherman's 
army. Let no advocate of Indefinite Tutelage whet his 
scalping-knife for me because of the use of that word 
11 carpet-bag. " It was as free from ill-will as the 
explosion incident to flash-light photography. We are 
trying to develop a picture of those times. Two at least 
of the Commission, Messrs. Taft and Wright, were the 
kind of men who in all the personal relations of life, 
meet the ultimate test of human confidence and friend- 
ship — you would make either, if he would consent to 
act, executor of your will, or testamentary guardian of 
your child. But they came out with the preconceived 
notion that kindness would win the people over, whereas 
what those people wanted was not foreign kindness but 
home rule, not silken political swaddling clothes, but 
freedom. And as the acquisition of the Philippines 
has placed us under the necessity of getting up a new 
definition of freedom, one consistent with tariff taxa- 
tion without representation — through legislation by a 
Congress on the other side of the world in which "our 
new possessions " have no vote — it should be added that 
one of the things Freedom meant with us before 1898, 



The Taft Commission 305 

was freedom to frame the laws — tariff and other — ■ 
which largely determine the selling price of crops and 
the purchase price of the necessities of life, freedom to 
see the intelligent and educated men of your own race 
in charge of your common destiny, freedom to have a 
flag as an emblem of your common interests, in a word, 
just Freedom. And that was what the war was about. 
They wanted to be free and independent. Whether 
they were fit for such freedom is wholly foreign to the 
reality and unanimity of their desire for it. General 
Otis used to be very fond of taking the wind out of the 
sails of their commissioners and other officials before 
the outbreak by saying that their people had not the 
slightest notion of what the word independence meant. 
It is true that they knew nothing about it by experience, 
but equally true that whatever it was, they wanted it. 
Of the ten thousand men we had already killed when 
Judge Taft arrived, there can be no question, as already 
heretofore suggested, that many of them may have been 
hit just as they were hurrahing for independence, in 
other words, died with the word ''Independence" on 
their lips. When men have been thus fighting against 
overwhelming odds for some sixteen months for govern- 
ment of their people by their people for their people — 
however inarticulate the emotions of the rank and file 
on going into battle — it is idle to claim that they do not 
know what they want, whether the great majority of 
the rank and file can read and write or not. But pur- 
suant to the idea that kindness would cure the desire 
for independence, Judge Taft ignored, in the outset, all 
advice from the military department, because that was 
not the kindness department, accepting as truly repre- 
sentative of the temper of the whole people the views of 
a few ultra-conservatives of large means who had always 
been part and parcel of the Spanish Administration. 



V 



306 American Occupation of Philippines 

On the other hand, General Mac Arthur and the whole 
Eighth Army Corps had seen a great insurrection drag 
on from month to month and from one year to another, 
under General Otis, when short shrift would have been 
made of it in the outset, and far less life sacrificed, if 
Mr. McKinley had not needed, in aid of his Philippine 
policy, the support of both of those who believed it was 
right and of those who believed it would pay. The one 
central thought which had seemed to animate General 
Otis from the beginning, a thought which we have 
already traced through all its humiliating manifesta- 
tions, was that he must neither do or permit anything 
that might hurt the Administration. When the " im- 
patience of the people" at home, which figures so 
prominently in the correspondence already cited be- 
tween the Adjutant General of the army, General 
Corbin, and General Otis at Manila, had begun to cast 
its shadows on the presidential year, 1900, the master 
mind of Mr. Root had interrupted the fatal Otis treat- 
ment of the insurrection, indicated by General Otis's 
long failure to call for volunteers, his stupid stream of 
"situation well in hand" and "insurrection about to 
collapse" telegrams, and his utterly unpardonable per- 
sistence in calling it a purely "Tagalo insurrection," 
by sending him a competent force, and a plan of cam- 
paign, and directing him to carry out the plan. General 
Otis did this, because he was told to, and then began 
again to sing the same old song. MacArthur, Wheaton, 
Lawton, Bates, Young, Funston, and the rest of the 
fighting generals, had submitted to all the Otis follies 
without a murmur, because insubordination degrades 
an army into a rabble. But they 1 believed the army 

1 General Lawton was killed in battle in the hour of victory at a point 
only about twelve miles out of Manila, in the winter preceding the spring 
of 1900 in which the Taft Commission left the United States for Manila. 



The Taft Commission 307 

was there to put down that insurrection, not to have a 
symposium with its leaders on the rights of man. They 
had taken up "The White Man's Burden," after the 
manner of Lords Kitchener and Roberts, and they had 
no qualms. Above all, they wanted peace, no matter 
how much righting it took to get it. Mindful of the 
attempts of the Schurman Commission of the year 
before to mix peace with war, and of the immense 
encouragement thus given the insurgents, they had not 
looked forward with enthusiasm to the coming of the 
Taft Commission, and to the highly probable renewal 
of negotiations with" the insurgent leaders in the field, 
pursuant to a presidential policy of patching up a peace 
at any price, suggested by the exigencies of political 
expediency, to give the government a semblance of 
having more or less of the consent of the governed. 
That the anticipations of the military authorities in 
this regard did not receive a pleasant disappointment, 
has already been suggested by the nature of the views 
adopted by the commission soon after its arrival. 

The military view of the situation, as it stood when 
Judge Taft and his colleagues arrived at Manila in 
June, 1900, is set forth in the annual report of the com- 
manding general, General MacArthur, rendered shortly 
thereafter; rendered, not in aid of any political candi- 
date at home, nor of a sudden, but at the usual and 
customary annual season for the making of such reports ; 
and rendered by a soldier of no mean experience and 
ability, who was a man of great kindliness of heart as 
well, to the war department of his government, to 
acquaint it with the facts of a military situation he had 
been dealing with for two years prior to the arrival of 
the Taft Commission. General MacArthur's views, as 
expressed in his report, must now be contrasted with 
the Taft view, not to show that MacArthur is a bigger 



308 American Occupation of Philippines 

man than Taft, nor for any other idle or petty purpose, 
but because, if, in 1900, General MacArthur was right, 
and Judge Taft was wrong, about the unanimity of the 
whole Filipino people against us, then the institution 
of the Civil Government, of the Philippines on July 4, 
1 90 1, was premature; and, therefore, by reason of the 
withdrawal of the strong arm of the military at a critical 
period of public order, it was not calculated to give 
adequate protection to the lives and property of those 
who were willing to abandon the struggle for independ- 
ence and submit to our rule. And if, as we shall see 
later, it did in fact grossly fail to afford such adequate 
protection for life and property, it was derelict in the 
most sacred duty enjoined upon it by Mr. McKinley's 
instructions to the Taft Commission. But first let me 
introduce you to General MacArthur. 

General MacArthur is not only a soldier of a high 
order of ability, but a statesman as well. Moreover, 
he was a thoroughgoing "expansionist." He believed 
in keeping the Philippines permanently, just as England 
does her colonies. But he was perfectly honest about 
it. He recognized the fact that they were against our 
rule. But he did not attach any more weight to that 
circumstance than Lord Kitchener would have done. 
Also, he had come out to the islands with the first 
expedition, in 1898, had been in the field continuously 
for fifteen months prior to assuming supreme military 
command, and knew the Filipinos thoroughly. As 
soon as he took command, on May 5, 1900, of the 70,000 
troops then in the Islands, he set himself with patience 
and firmness to the great task of ending the insurrection, 
which at that time promised to continue indefinitely, 
the far more formidable guerrilla warfare that had 
followed the brief period of serried resistance having 
now settled down to a chronic stage, aided and abetted 



The Taft Commission 309 

by the whole population. I have said General Mac- 
Arthur was a " thoroughgoing" expansionist. This 
needs a slight qualification. At first he appears to have 
had a few qualms. Shortly after the outbreak of the 
war with the Filipinos, when he took the first insurgent 
capital Malolos, in March, 1899, he had said at Malolos, 
as we have seen, to a newspaper man who accompanied 
the expedition : 

When I first started in against these rebels, I believed 
that Aguinaldo's troops represented only a faction. I did 
not believe that the whole population of Luzon was opposed 
to us; but I have been reluctantly compelled to believe that 
the Filipinos are loyal to Aguinaldo and the government 
which he represents. 1 

General MacArthur's reports concerning the war in 
the Philippines during the period of his command are 
succinct and luminous. He makes it perfectly clear 
that the original resistance offered by the insurgent 
armies in the field after the arrival of the overwhelm- 
ingly ample reinforcements sent out from this country in 
the fall of 1899, was little more than a mere flash in 
the pan, compared with the well-planned scheme of re- 
sistance which followed the dispersion of those armies to 
the several provinces which had furnished them to the 
cause, and Aguinaldo's simultaneous flight into the 
mountains "with his government concealed about his 
person," as Senator Lodge exultantly described that 
incident in his speech of April, 1900, in defence of the 
Administration's Philippine policy. Speaking of this 
period, General MacArthur says : 

1 This interview was indorsed as substantially correct by General 
MacArthur before the Senate Committee of 1902, Senator Culberson 
first reading it to him and then asking him if it quoted him correctly. 
See hearing on Philippine affairs, 1902, Senate Document jji, pt. 2, 
p. 1942. 



310 American Occupation of Philippines 

It has since been ascertained that the expediency of 
adopting guerrilla warfare from the inception of hostilities 
was seriously discussed by the native leaders, and advocated 
with much emphasis as the system best adapted to the 
peculiar conditions of the struggle. It was finally deter- 
mined, however, that a concentrated field army, conducting 
regular operations, would, in the event of success, attract 
the favorable attention of the world, and be accepted as a 
practical demonstration of capacity for organization and 
self-government. The disbandment of the field army, 
therefore, having been a subject of contemplation from the 
start, the actual event, in pursuance of the deliberate action 
of the council of war in Bayambang about November 12, 
1899 (already hereinbefore noticed), was not regarded by 
Filipinos in the light of a calamity, but simply as a transition 
from one form of action to another; a change which by many 
was regarded as a positive advantage, and was relied upon 
to accomplish more effectively the end in view. The Fili- 
pino idea behind the dissolution of their field army was not 
at the time of the occurrence well understood in the Ameri- 
can camp. As a consequence, misleading conclusions were 
reached to the effect that the insurrection itself had been 
destroyed, and that it only remained to sweep up the fag 
ends of the rebel army by a system of police administration 
not likely to be either onerous or dangerous. * 

In his report covering the period from May 5th, to 
October 1, 1900, General MacArthur says of the policy 
of resistance above outlined : 

The country affords great advantages for the practical 
development of such a policy. The practice of discarding 
the uniform enables the insurgents to appear and disappear 
almost at their convenience. At one time they are in the 
ranks as soldiers, and immediately thereafter are within 
the American lines in the attitude of peaceful natives, 
absorbed in a dense mass of sympathetic people. 2 

1 War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 88. 

2 Ibid., 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 60. 



The Taft Commission 3 11 

In this same connection the report includes a copy 
of the original order of the insurgent government which 
was the corner stone of the guerrilla policy, and states 
that "systemized regulations" for its effective prosecu- 
tion throughout the archipelago had been compiled and 
published by the Filipino junta, or revolutionary com- 
mittee at Madrid, and distributed among the insurgent 
forces. The report also appends a copy of the "Army 
Regulations" under which the insurgent forces were 
to conduct the guerrilla warfare. It also describes in 
detail the system of warfare prescribed under these 
regulations, and states that as a result of the measures 
which he, General MacArthur, took to combat that 
warfare "the 53 stations of American troops occupied 
in the archipelago on November 1, 1899, had on 
September 1, 1900, expanded to 413," and that during 
this period, the casualties to our troops were 268 killed, 
750 wounded, 55 captured, and to the insurgents, so far 
as our records showed, 3227 killed, 694 wounded, and 
2864 captured. Says he: 

The extensive distribution of troops has strained the 
soldiers of the army to the full limit of endurance. Each 
little command has had to provide its own service of security 
and information by never ceasing patrols, explorations, 
escorts, outposts, and regular guards. An idea seems to 
have been established in the public mind [he meant the 
public mind at home, of course] that the field work of the 
army is in the nature of police, in regulating a few bands of 
guerrillas, and involving none of the vicissitudes of war. 
[Here he is meeting the Otis theory, then being industriously 
circulated in the United States.] Such a narrow statement 
of the case is unfair to the service. In all things requiring 
endurance, fortitude, and patient diligence, the guerrilla 
period has been pre-eminent. It is difficult for the non- 
professional observer [he means Judge Taft] to understand 



312 American Occupation of Philippines 

that apparently desultory work, such as has prevailed in 
the Philippines during the past ten months, x has demanded 
more of discipline and as much of valor as was required during 
the period of regular operations against the concentrated 
field forces of the insurrection. It is, therefore, a great 
privilege to speak warmly in respect of the importance of 
the service rendered day by day, with unremitting vigilance, 
by the splendid men who," etc. 2 

It was not until July 4, 1902, that President Roosevelt 
officially declared, by his amnesty proclamation of that 
date that the insurrection in the Philippines was at last 
ended. It was by no means beaten to a frazzle, as we 
shall later see. But of course, knowing the impatience 
of a large portion of the American people with a situa- 
tion about which there was a wide-spread notion that 
much remained undisclosed, Mr. Roosevelt would have 
issued such a proclamation earlier, had the facts seemed 
to him to so authorize. General MacArthur's relent- 
less " never ceasing patrols, explorations," etc., con- 
tinued straight on through the presidential campaign 
of 1900 side by side in point of time with the roseate 
Taft cablegrams of the same period, and long thereafter 
— how long will be later indicated. Says General 
Mac Arthur, in his report for 1901 : 

It had been suggested that some of the Filipino leaders 
were willing to submit the issue to the judgment of the 
American people, which was soon to be expressed at the 
polls, and to abide by the result of the presidential election 
of November, 1900. 3 But subsequent events demonstrated 

1 November, 1899, to September, 1900, both inclusive. 

2 W. D. R., 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 60. 

3 Judge Taft had cabled Secretary of War Root on August 21, 1900, 
after his arrival in June: " Defining of political issues in United States 
reported here in full, gave hope to insurgent officers still in arms, * * * 
and stayed surrenders to await result of election." See War Depart- 
ment Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 80. 



The Taft Commission 313 

that the hope of ending the war without further effusion of 
blood was not well founded, and that as a matter of fact the 
Filipinos were organizing for further desperate resistance by- 
means of a general banding of the people in support of the 
guerrillas in the field. r 

General MacArthur then goes on to tell how, as part 
of this programme, the insurgent authorities, 

announced a primal and inflexible principle, to the 
effect that every native, without any exception, residing 
within the limits of the archipelago, owed active allegiance 
to the insurgent cause. This jurisdiction was enjoined under 
severe penalties, which were systematically enforced. 

This is what Judge Taft afterwards described as "a 
conspiracy of murder, a Mafia on a very large scale", 2 
the characterization being made in support of his theory 
that "the great majority of the people" with whom we 
were then at war would welcome our rule if allowed to 
follow their real preferences, and that they were being 
cruelly coerced to fight for the independence of their 
country. General MacArthur's view, however, did 
not support this theory. His report deals with this 
branch of the subject thus: 

The cohesion of Filipino society in behalf of insurgent 
interests is most emphatically illustrated by the fact that 
assassination, which was extensively employed, was gener- 
ally accepted as a legitimate expression of insurgent govern- 
mental authority. The individuals marked for death would 
not appeal to American protection, although condemned ex- 
clusively on account of supposed pro- Americanism. 

Later on, when we came to understand the Filipinos 
better, this summary method of dealing with the faint- 

1 War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 89. 

2 See Report of Taft Commission to Secretary of War, dated November 
30, 1900. 



314 American Occupation of Philippines 

hearted lost much of its initial horrifying force, and the 
failure of such to appeal to us for protection lost much 
of its strangeness. In the first place, nobody loves 
a traitor. Even those to whom he claims to have 
betrayed his countrymen do not trust him implicitly. 
Again, Latin countries never assume that before a man 
is punished for alleged crime he has been confronted 
with the witnesses against him. Such testimony is, 
under their jurisprudence, frequently received in his 
absence. The legal department of General Mac- 
Arthur's office once got hold of a captured insurgent 
paper subscribed with the autograph of Juan Cailles, 
one of their best generals. It directed that a named 
Filipino residing in a certain town garrisoned by Ameri- 
can troops be executed — we of course, would call it 
"assassinated" — at a certain hour on a certain day in a 
public street of the town, and that the soldier or soldiers 
performing the " execution" should declare to the by- 
standers, if any, in so doing, that it was done because the 
man was a traitor, a friend of the Americans. We kept 
this paper, intending to hang Juan whenever he should 
be captured. He held out a long time, and finally sur- 
rendered unconditionally — but he proved such an ele- 
gant fellow, game as a pebble, courteous as Chesterfield, 
and immensely popular with his people, that it was 
decided he could be of more service as a live governor 
of a province than he could as a dead general, x so he was 
appointed a provincial governor by Governor Taft, and 
made a splendid official. 

Another reason why Filipinos suspected, during the 
insurrection, by the more obstinate and stout-hearted 

1 A sample of one of these death sentences that Cailles and all the 
rest of the insurgent generals were accustomed to issue against their 
"Copperheads" may be seen in General MacArthur's report for 1900. 
War Department Report, 1900, vol. L, pt. 5, p. 63. 



The Taft Commission 315 

of their compatriots who held out longer in the struggle 
for independence, of weakening toward the cause of 
their country, in other words, suspected of what might 
be called "Copperhead" or "Tory" tendencies, would 
not appeal to us for protection, is strikingly presented 
in General MacArthur's report for 1901. He says they 
naturally had "grave doubt as to the wisdom" of siding 
with us, "as the United States had made no formal 
announcement of an inflexible purpose to hold the 
archipelago and afford protection to pro-Americans." 1 
The one great thing that has crippled progress in the 
Philippines from the beginning of the American occupa- 
tion down to date is the uncertainty as to what our 
policy for the future is to be, the lack of some, "formal 
announcement of an inflexible purpose. " And of course 
I mean, as General MacArthur meant, by "jormal" 
announcement, an authoritative declaration by the law- 
making power of the government. If Congress should 
formally declare that it is the purpose of this govern- 
ment to hold the Philippines permanently, American 
and other capital would at once go there in abundance 
and the place would "blossom like a rose. " If, on the 
other hand, Congress should formally declare that it is 
the purpose of this government to give the Filipinos 
their independence as soon as a stable native govern- 
ment can be set up, thus holding out to the present 
generation the prospect of living to see the independ- 
ence of their country, the place would also quickly 
blossom as aforesaid, through the generous ardor of 
native love of country. In either event, everybody out 
there would know where he is "at." At present all is 
uncertainty, both with the resident members of the 
dominant alien race, and with those over whom we 
are ruling. 

1 War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 90. 



316 American Occupation of Philippines 

It took over 120,000 American troops, first and last, 
to put down the struggle of the Filipinos for indepen- 
dence. x The war began February 4, 1899, and the last 
public official announcement that it was ended was on 
July 4, 1902. 2 Of course this does not imply that every 
province was at all times during that period a theatre 
of actual war. Putting down the insurrection was 
something like putting out a fire in a field of dry grass. 
At first the trouble was general. Gradually it dimin- 
ished toward the end. But for a while, no sooner was 
it quenched in one province than it would break out in 
another. How the Filipinos were able to prolong the 
struggle as long as they did against such apparently 
overwhelming odds is most interestingly explained by 
General MacArthur in his report for 1900. After 
describing the method he followed of establishing native 
municipal governments in territory as conquered, he 
says, with a patient stateliness that is almost humorous : 

The institution of municipal government under American 
auspices, of course, carried the idea of exclusive fidelity to 
the sovereign power of the United States. All the necessary 
moral obligations to that end were readily assumed by 
municipal bodies, and all outward forms of loyalty and 
decorum carefully preserved. But precisely at this point 
the psychologic conditions referred to above [meaning 
the unity against us], 3 began to work with great energy, 
in assistance of insurgent field operations. For this purpose 
most of the towns secretly organized complete insurgent 
municipal governments, to proceed simultaneously and in 
the same sphere as the American governments and in many 
instances through the same personnel — that is to' say, the 

1 See Report of Secretary Root for 1902, p. 13. 

2 Just how correct this was will be examined later. 

3 "The people seem to be actuated by the idea that men are never 
nearer right than when going with their own kith and kin." War 
Department Report,igoo, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 61. 



The Taft Commission 317 

presidentes and town officials acted openly in behalf of the 
Americans and secretly in behalf of the insurgents, and, 
paradoxical as it may seem, with considerable apparent 
solicitude for the interests of both. In all matters touching 
the peace of the town, the regulation of markets, the primi- 
tive work possible on roads, streets, and bridges, and the 
institution of schools, their open activity was commendable; 
at the same time they were exacting and collecting contribu- 
tions and supplies and recruiting men for the Filipino forces, 
and sending all obtainable military information to the 
Filipino leaders. Wherever, throughout the archipelago, 
there is a group of the insurgent army, it is a fact beyond 
dispute, that all contiguous towns contribute to the main- 
tenance thereof. In other words, the towns, regardless of 
the fact of American occupation and town organization, 
are the actual bases for all insurgent military activities; 
and not only so in the sense of furnishing supplies for the 
so-called flying columns of guerrillas, but as affording secure 
places of refuge. Indeed, it is now the most important 
maxim of Filipino tactics to disband when closely pressed 
and seek safety in the nearest barrio; a manoeuvre quickly 
accomplished by reason of the assistance of the people and 
the ease with which the Filipino soldier is transformed into 
the appearance of a peaceful native. 1 

To contrast a cold, hard military fact involving the 
lives of American soldiers with a lot of political nonsense 
intended for consumption in the United States during a 
presidential election, the next paragraph is particularly 
interesting in the light of the cotemporaneous Taft view : 2 

The success of this unique system of war depends upon almost 
complete unity of action of the entire native population. That 

1 General MacArthur's Annual Report dated October i, 1900. War 
Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, pp. 61-2. 

2 General MacArthur's report which we are now quoting from, dated 
October 1, 1900, was forwarded by the ordinary course of mail, and even 
if it arrived before the day of the November election, the Secretary of 
War certainly did not at once place it before the public. 



318 American Occupation of Philippines 

such unity is a fact is too obvious to admit of discussion. 
Intimidation has undoubtedly accomplished much to this 
end, but fear as the only motive is hardly sufficient to 
account for the united and apparently spontaneous action 
of several millions of people. 1 One traitor in each town 
would effectually destroy such a complex organization. 

Then follows this bit of grim humor : 

It is more probable that the adhesive principle comes from 
ethnological homogeneity which induces men to respond for 
a time to the appeals of consanguineous leadership — 

in other words, to stick to their own kith and kin. 
He had in a previous paragraph used that very expres- 
sion thus : ' ' The people seem to be actuated by the idea 
that in politics or war men are never nearer right then 
when going with their own kith and kin. " 

In all the foregoing, General MacArthur was not 
simply trying to score a point against Judge Taft, 
though his resentment of the effort of the Taft Commis- 
sion of 1900 to mix politics with war in the presidential 
year was quite as decided, and quite as well known in 
the islands at the time, as w^as General Otis's similar 
attitude toward the Schurman Commission of the 
previous year. 2 He is simply laying before the War 

1 Compare this MacArthur, October 1, 1900, statement with the Taft 
statements of the same situation between June and November, 1900, 
as expressed for instance in his November, 1900, report to the Secretary 
of War thus: "A great majority of the people long for peace and are entirely 
willing to accept the establishment of a government under the supremacy 
of the United States. They are, however, restrained by fear. * * * 
Without this, armed resistance to the United States authority would 
have long ago ceased. It is a Mafia on a very large scale. " Report, 
Taft Commission, November 30, 1900, p. 17. This was before Judge 
Taft met Juan Cailles above mentioned and liked him well enough to 
make him governor of a province, in spite of his being an "assassin," 
in other words a Filipino general who had a few weak-kneed fellows 
shot for being too friendly with the Americans. 

2 Chapter XL, ante. 



The Taft Commission 319 

Department, as a soldier, the familiar facts of a situa- 
tion which he had been dealing with for two years past, 
as well known to the 70,000 officers and men under his 
command as to himself. And as the details into which 
he goes are simply prefatory to an account of the remedy 
he applied to the situation, that remedy must now claim 
our attention. The remedy General MacArthur finally 
applied was a proclamation, explaining to the Filipino 
people — "to all classes throughout the archipelago," it 
read, and especially to the leaders in the field, many of 
whose captured comrades-in-arms he had now become 
thoroughly acquainted with — the severities sanctioned 
by the laws of civilized nations under such circum- 
stances, and the reasons therefor; and, further, serving 
them with notice that thenceforward he proposed to 
enforce those laws with full rigor. T 

The eminent lawyers of the Taft Commission were 
too busy about that time acquainting themselves with 
the situation through natives not in arms, to attach 
much importance to General MacArthur's proclama- 
tion, but the Eighth Army Corps always believed that 
that proclamation, and the army's work under it, was 
the main factor in making the civil government at all 
possible by the date it was set up, July 4, 1901. The 
issuance of this document was not only a wise military 
move, but a subtle stroke of statesmanship as well. It 
assumed that the Filipino people were a civilized people, 
an assumption never indulged by Spain during the 
whole of her rule, but always freely admitted by General 
MacArthur in all his dealings with their leading men to 
be a fact. It therefore appealed to their amour propre, 
and to the noblesse oblige of many of the most obstinate 
and trusted fighting leaders. The writer was, at the 
date of the proclamation under consideration, on duty 

1 See War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, pp. 65-6. 



320 American Occupation of Philippines 

at General MacArthur's headquarters, as assistant to 
Colonel Crowder, his judge advocate, now Judge Advo- 
cate General of the United States Army, and prepared 
the first rough, tentative suggestions for the final draft 
of it, accompanying such suggestions with a memoran- 
dum showing the course taken by Wellington in France 
in 1815, and by Bismarck's generals at the close of the 
Franco-Prussian War, as well as that followed under 
General Order No. 100, 1863, for the government of the 
armies of the United States in the field. Having then 
entertained the opinion that that proclamation, though 
drastic, was wise and right under the facts of the situa- 
tion which confronted us, and having nowise changed 
that opinion since, it may be well for the writer of this 
book to explain his reasons for that opinion. This 
must be done wholly without reference to ' ' the authori- 
ties, " for neither at the bar of public opinion, nor at the 
bar of final judgment, do "the authorities" count for 
much. In so doing, however, we must start with the 
assumption that it was a case of American military 
occupation of hostile territory, notwithstanding that 
Judge Taft began soon after his arrival in the islands 
in the June previous to the December now referred to, 
to cable home impressions which, if correct, amounted 
to a denial that the great body of the people were 
hostile. Military occupation is a fact which admits of 
no debate, and the necessity of making your country's 
flag respected is always fully and keenly recognized as 
the one supreme consideration by every good American 
except one who, obsessed with the idea that kindness 
will cure the desire of a people for independence, pro- 
ceeds to act on that idea in the midst of a war for 
independence. 

Under the laws of war the commanding general of the 
occupying force owes protection, both of life and prop- 



The Taft Commission 321 

erty, to all persons residing within the territory occu- 
pied. The object of General MacArthur's proclamation 
was to put a stop to such "executions," or assassina- 
tions, as that perpetrated by Juan Cailles, mentioned 
above, and to separate the insurgents in the field from 
their main reliance, the towns. The latter end of a 
bloody war is no time for a discussion of the causes of 
the war between victor and vanquished. Nor is it any 
time to believe the representative of the enemy who 
tells you that most of him is really in sympathy with 
you and merely coerced. Your duty is to stop the war. 
You and your enemy having had a difference, and hav- 
ing referred it to the arbitrament of war, which is, 
unfortunately, at present the only human jurisdiction 
having power to enforce decisions concerning such 
differences, if you win, and your enemy refuses to abide 
the decision, he is simply, as it were in contempt of 
court, and, in the scheme of things, as at present 
ordered, deserves punishment as an enemy to the 
general peace. To state the ethics of the matter 
juridically, "there should be an end of litigation' ' — 
somewhere. 

I do not believe in the doctrine that might makes 
right, and I cherish the high hope that this human 
family of ours will survive to see war superseded, as the 
ultimate arbiter, by something more like heaven and 
less like hell. But in the Philippines in 1900 it was a 
situation, not a theory, that confronted us, and, as far 
as my consciously fallible thinking apparatus lights the 
way which then lay before us, that way led to a shrine 
whereon was written "A life for a life." This is no 
mere academic discussion. With me it is a tremen- 
dously practical one. In the gravest possible accepta- 
tion of the term it is AWE-fully so. If I am wrong, every 
execution I approved by memorandum review furnished 



322 American Occupation of Philippines 

Colonel Crowder and General MacArthur, of military 
commission findings out there was wrong, and so were 
a number of the executions I ordered as a judge ap- 
pointed by Governor Taft under a government which, 
though nominally a civil government, was no more 
" civil" in so far as that term implies absence of neces- 
sity for the presence of military force, than other 
governments immediately following conquest usually 
are. The propriety of the imposition of capital punish- 
ment by the constituted authorities of a nation as part 
of a set policy to make its sovereignty respected, is 
wholly independent of whether you call your colonial 
government a civil or a military one. So that in justi- 
fying General MacArthur I am also justifying Governor 
Taft, and as it was on the recommendation of the former 
that the latter appointed me to the Bench, we are 
certainly all three in the same boat in the matter of the 
capital punishments under consideration. And while 
the company you were in on earth in a given transaction, 
however distinguished that company, is not going to 
help you with the Recording Angel, 1 still, it is some 
comfort to know that wiser and abler men than yourself 
approved a course of imposing capital punishments to 
which you were a party, such punishments having been 
inflicted as part of a policy whose subsequent evolution 
revealed it to you as fundamentally wrong. And this 
reflection is quite relevant in the present connection to 
the question whether the government of Benevolent 

1 As for my share as a soldier in that Philippine Insurrection, admit- 
ting, as I now do, that it was a tragedy of errors, the President of the 
United States would indeed be a very impotent Chief Executive if it were 
every American's duty to deliberate as a judge on the Bench before he 
decided to answer a president's call for volunteers in an emergency. 
I am not yet so highly educated as to find no inward response to the 
sentiment, "Right or wrong, my country." If this sentiment is not 
right, no republic can long survive, for the ultimate safety of republics 
must lie in volunteer soldiery. 



The Taft Commission 323 

Assimilation we have maintained over the Filipinos for 
the last fourteen years is one which was originally 
imposed by force against their will, or whether it was 
ever welcomed by them or any considerable fraction of 
them. 

That the MacArthur proclamation of December 20, 
1900, concerning the laws of war, was at the time a 
military necessity, is as perfectly clear to me now as it 
was then. And yet it may well give the thoughtful and 
patriotic American pause. It is sometimes difficult to 
understand why men are so often entirely willing to go 
on fighting and dying in a cause they must know to be 
hopeless. The famous passage of Edmund Burke's 
speech on " Conciliation with America," 

If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, so long 
as foreign troops remained on my native soil, I never would 
lay down my arms, no, never, never, never! 

sounds well to us, but from the standpoint of a con- 
queror, there is a good deal of wind-jamming to it, after 
all. It was the language of a man who knew nothing 
of the horrors of war by actual experience, or of what 
hell it slowly becomes to everybody concerned after 
most of the high officials of the vanquished government 
have been captured and are sleeping on dry, warm 
beds, eating good wholesome food, and smoking good 
cigars, in comfortable custody, while the vanquished 
army, no longer strong enough to come out in the open 
and fight, is relegated to ambuscades and other tactics 
equally akin to the methods of the assassin. The law 
of nations in this regard is an expression of the views of 
successive generations of civilized and enlightened men 
of all nations whose profession was war — men familiar 
with the horrors inevitably incident to it and anxious 
to mitigate them as far as possible. That law repre- 



324 American Occupation of Philippines 

sents the common consensus of Christendom resulting 
from that experience. It recognizes that after resist- 
ance becomes utterly hopeless, it becomes a crime 
against society and the general peace, and this is 
wholly independent of the merits or demerits of the 
questions involved in the war. In other words, the 
greatest good of the greatest number cries aloud that 
the war must stop. The cold, hard fact is that the great 
majority of the men who hold out longest are, usually, 
either single men having no one dependent on them, or 
nothing to lose, or both, or else they are men more or 
less indifferent to the ties of family affection, and callous 
to the suffering fruitlessly entailed upon innocent non- 
combatants by the various and sundry horrors of war, 
such as decimation of the plough animals of the country 
due to their running at large without caretakers or 
forage; resultant untilled fields and scant food; pesti- 
lence and famine consequent upon insufficient nourish- 
ment; arson, robbery, rape, and murder inevitably 
committed in such times by sorry scamps and ruffians 
claiming to be patriots but yielding no allegiance to any 
responsible head; and so on, ad infinitum. 

General MacArthur's proclamation of December 20, 
1900, served notice on the leaders of a hopeless cause 
that assassinations, such as that ordered by Juan 
Cailles, above mentioned, must stop ; that the universal 
practice of the townfolk, of sending money, supplies, 
and information concerning our movements to the 
enemy in the field, must stop; that participating in 
hostilities intermittently, in citizen garb, followed by 
return to home and avocation when too hard pressed, 
must stop; in short that the war must stop. Yet the 
proclamation explained in so firm and kindly a way why 
the penalties it promised were only reasonable under 
the circumstances, that "as an educational document 



The Taft Commission 3 2 5 

the effect was immediate and far-reaching," 1 to quote 
from an opinion expressed by its author in the body of 
it, an opinion entirely consistent with modesty and 
fully justified by the facts. General MacArthur also 
goes on to say of his unrelenting and rigid enforcement 
of the terms of this proclamation that the results 
"preclude all possibility of doubt * * * that the effec- 
tive pacification of the archipelago commenced Decem- 
ber 20, 1900" — its date. It is a part of the history of 
those times, familiar to all who are familiar with them, 
that the Taft Civil Commission thought its assurances 
of the benevolent intentions of our government were 
what made the civil government possible by mid- 
summer, 1 901. But whatever the Filipinos may think 
of us at present, now that they understand us better, 
certainly in 1900-01, in view of the events of the pre- 
ceding two or three years, which formed the basis of the 
only acquaintance they then had with us, and in view 
of the fact that their experience for the preceding two 
or three hundred years had made force the only effective 
governmental argument with them, and governmental 
promises a mere mockery, and in view of the fact that 
the "never-ceasing patrols, explorations, escorts, out- 
posts," etc., of General MacArthur's 70,000 men were 
relentlessly kept up during the six months immediately 
following the proclamation and in aid of it, it at once 
becomes obvious how infinitesimal a fraction of the 
final partial pacification which made the civil govern- 
ment possible, the Taft assurances to the Filipinos as to 
our intentions must have been. These matters are of 
prime importance to any honest effort toward a clear 
understanding of present conditions, because far and 
away the greatest wrong which we, in our genuinely 
benevolent misinformation, have done the Filipinos, 
1 Page 93. 



326 American Occupation of Philippines 

not even excepting the tariff legislation perpetrated 
upon them by Congress, lies in the insufferably hypo- 
critical pretence that they ever consented to our rule, 
or that they consent to it now — a pretence conceived in 
1898 by Trade Expansion, to beguile a nation the 
breath of whose own life is political liberty based on 
consent of the governed, into a career of conquest, but 
not even countenanced since by those who believe the 
Government should go into the politico-missionary 
business, after the manner of Spain in the sixteenth 
century. 

Having now exhaustively examined the differences 
of opinion between Judge Taft and General MacArthur, 
when the former set to work, in the summer of 1900, to 
get a civil government started by the date of expira- 
tion of the term of enlistment of the volunteer army 
(June 30, 1901), let us follow the facts of the situation 
up to the date last named, or, which is practically the 
same thing, up to the inauguration of Judge Taft as 
Civil Governor of the islands on July 4, 1901, pausing, 
in passing, for such reflections as may force themselves 
upon us as pertinent to the Philippine problem of 
to-day. 

On September 19, 1900, General MacArthur wired 
Secretary of War Root — General Corbin, the Adjutant- 
General of the Army, to be exact, but it is the same 
thing — describing what he calls "considerable activity" 
throughout Luzon, ominously stating that General 
Young (up in the Ilocano country, into which we 
followed him and his cavalry in Chapter XII, ante) "has 
called so emphatically for more force," that he, Mac- 
Arthur, feels grave concern; adding that Luzon north 
of the Pasig is "very much disturbed, " and that south 
of the Pasig the same conditions prevail. x 

1 Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 121 1. 



The Taft Commission 327 

October 26th, General MacArthur cables outlining a 
plan for a great campaign on comprehensive lines, 
stating that "Full development of this scheme requires 
about four months and all troops now in the islands," 
and deprecating any move on Mr. Root's part to reduce 
his force of 70,000 men by starting any of the volunteers 
homeward before it should be absolutely necessary. 1 
October 28th, General MacArthur wires, "Shall push 
everything with great vigor," adding " Expect to have 
everything in full operation November 15th. " 2 Novem- 
ber 5th, as if to reassure General MacArthur that he 
and the General understand each other and that the 
Taft cotemporaneous nonsense is not going to be 
allowed to interfere with more serious business, Secre- 
tary Root, through the Adjutant-General, sends this 
cable message: 

Secretary of War directs no instructions from here be al- 
lowed interfere or impede progress your military opera- 
tions which he expects you force to successful conclusion. 3 

So that while the American people were being 
pacified with the Taft cablegrams to Secretary Root 
that the Filipino people wanted peace, General Mac- 
Arthur, under Mr. Root's direction, was simultaneously 
proceeding to make them want it with the customary 
argument used to settle irreconcilable differences be- 
tween nations — powder and lead. Mr. Root was all 
the time in constant communication with both, but 
he gave out only the Taft optimism to the public, and 
withheld the actual facts within his knowledge. Decem- 
ber 25th, General MacArthur wires Secretary Root," Ex- 
pectations based on result of election have not been 
realized. " " Progress, ' ' he says, is ' ' very slow. ' ' 4 

1 Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1222. 

2 Ibid., vol. ii., p. 1223. 3 Ibid., p. 1226. 4 Ibid., p. 1237. 



328 American Occupation of Philippines 

And now I come to one of the most important things 
that all my researches into the official records of our 
government concerning the Philippine Islands have 
developed. On December 28, 1900, General Mac- 
Arthur reports by cable the contents of some important 
insurgent papers captured in Cavite Province about 
that time. The Filipinos have a great way of reducing 
to writing, or making minutes of, whatever occurs at 
any important conference. This habit they did not 
abandon in the field. The papers in question belonged 
to General Trias, the Lieutenant-General commanding 
all the insurgent armies in the field, and, next to Aguin- 
aldo, the highest official connected with the revolution- 
ary government. One of these papers, according to 
General MacArthur's despatch of December 28th, pur- 
ported to be the minutes of a certain meeting had 
October nth previous, between General Trias and the 
Japanese Consul at Manila. As to whether or not the 
paper was really authentic, General MacArthur says: 
"I accept it as such without hesitation." Communi- 
cating the contents of the paper he says : 

Consul advised that Trias visit Japan. Filipinos repre- 
sented that concessions which they might be forced to make 
to Washington would be more agreeable if made to Japan, 
which as a nation of kindred blood would not be likely to assert 
superiority. Consul said Japan desired coaling station, 
freedom to trade and build railways. 1 

I consider these negotiations of the Japanese Govern- 
ment with the Philippine insurgents important to be 
related here because they have never been generally 
known, for the good reason, of course, that the President 
of the United States cannot take the public into his 
confidence about such grave and delicate matters when 

1 See Correspondence Relating to War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1239. 



The Taft Commission 329 

they occur. The incident is not " ancient history' ' 
relatively to present- day problems, for the following 
reasons : 

(1) Because it is credibly reported and currently 
believed in the United States that in Japan, during 
the cruise of our battleship fleet around the world in 
1907, one of the reception committee of Japanese 
officers who welcomed our officers was recognized by 
one of the latter as having been, not a great while before 
that, a servant aboard an American battleship. 

(2) Because of the following incident, related to me, 
in 191 1, without the slightest injunction of secrecy, by 
the Director of Public Health of the Philippine Islands, 
then on a visit to the United States. Shortly before 
the Director's said visit home, while he was out in one 
of the provinces, there was brought to his attention a 
Filipino with a broken arm. There was a Japanese 
doctor in the town, at least a Japanese who had a sign 
out as a doctor. The Director carried the sufferer to 
the ' "doctor," not being a surgeon himself. The 
" doctor" turned out to be a civil engineer, who had 
been making maps and plans of fortifications. The 
plans were found in his possession. 

(3) Because from one of the islands through 
which the northern line of the Treaty of Paris runs, 
situated only a pleasant morning's journey in a 
launch due north of Aparri, the northernmost town 
of Luzon, you can see, on a clear day, with a good 
field-glass, the southern end of Formosa, some 60 
or 70 miles away. Japan can land an army on Ameri- 
can soil at Aparri any time she wants to, overnight — 
an army several times that of the total American force 
now in the Philippines, 1 or likely ever to be there. 
From Aparri it is 70 miles up the river to Tueguegarao, 

1 Ten or twelve thousand. 



33° American Occupation of Philippines 

40 more to lligan, and 90 more, all fairly good marching, 
to Bayombong, in Nueva Viscaya (total distance, 
Aparri to Bayombong, 200 miles) the province which 
lies in the heart of the watershed of Central Luzon. I 
know what I am talking about, because that region was 
the first judicial district I presided over, and many a 
hard journey I have had over it, circuit riding, on a 
scrubby pony. Part of it 1 have been through in the 
company of President Taft. It thus appears that from 
Aparri to Bayombong there would be but a week or ten 
days of unresisted marching to reach the watershed 
region, Nueva Viscaya. The Japanese soldier's ration 
is mainly rice, so that he can carry more days' travel 
rations than almost any other soldier in the w T orld. 
Never fear about their making the journey inside of a 
week or ten days, once they start. To descend from 
the watershed aforesaid, over the Caranglan Pass, and 
down the valley of the Rio Grande de Pampanga to 
Manila, another three or four days would be all that 
would be needed. It would be a Japanese picnic. 
Fortifying Corregidor Island, at the entrance to Manila 
Bay, which is about all the serious scheme of defence 
against a foreign foe we have out there, is quite like the 
reliance of the Spaniards on Morro Castle, at the mouth 
of the harbor of Santiago de Cuba, against our landing 
at Guantanamo. Our garrison in the Philippines, all 
told, is but a handful. Aparri is an absolutely unforti- 
fied seaport, at which the Japanese could land an army 
overnight from the southern end of Formosa. There 
are no military fortifications whatsoever to stay the 
advance of an invading army from Aparri down the 
Cagayan Valley, and thence over the watershed of 
Nueva Viscaya Province, through the Caranglan Pass, 
and down the valley of the Pampanga River to Manila. 
So that to-day Japan can take Manila inside of two 



The Taft Commission 331 

weeks any time she wants to. That is why I object to 
the President's "jollying" the situation along as best 
he can, without taking the American people into his 
confidence. Any army officer at our War College will 
inform any member of the House or Senate on inquiry, 
that Japan can take the Philippines any time she wants 
to. President Taft and the Mikado may keep on 
exchanging the most cordial cablegrams imaginable, 
but the map-making goes on just the same. And, 
earnest and sincere as both the President and the 
Emperor undoubtedly are in their desire to preserve 
the general peace, who is going to restrain Hobson and 
Hearst, and several of Japan's public men equally dis- 
tinguished and equally inflammatory ? Heads of nations 
cannot restrain gusts of popular passion. The Pacific 
Coast is not so friendly to Japan as the rest of our 
country, and as between Japan and the Pacific Coast, 
we are pretty apt to stand by the latter without inquir- 
ing with meticulous nicety into any differences that may 
arise. 

The reason I said in the chapter before this one that 
Mr. Root is a dangerous man to Republican institutions 
was because he is of the type who are constantly finding 
situations which the}^ consider it best for the people not 
to know about. After the McKinley election of 1900 
was safely "put over," Mr. Root, as Secretary of War, 
let Judge Taft go ahead and ride his dove-of-peace 
hobby-horse in the Philippines, duly repeating to the 
American people all the cheery Taft duckings to said 
horse, at a time when the real situation is indicated by 
such grim correspondence as the following cablegram 
dated January 29, 1901 : 

Wood, Havana : Secretary of War is desirous to know if 
you can give your consent to the immediate withdrawal 



33 2 American Occupation of Philippines 

Tenth Infantry from Cuba. Imperative that we have immedi- 
ate use of every available company we can lay our hands on 
for service in the Philippines. (Signed) Corbin. x 

But let us turn from this sorry spectacle of Mr. Root 
pulling the wool over the eyes of his countrymen to 
make them believe the Filipinos were not quite so 
unconsenting as they seemed to be, and again look at 
the sheer splendor of American military ability to get 
anything done the Government wants done. I refer 
to the capture of Aguinaldo. 

One of the most eminent lawyers in this country once 
said to me, "I would not let that man Funston enter 
my house. " I tried to enlighten him, but as I hap- 
pened to be a guest in his house at the time, which 
entitled him to exemption from light if he insisted — 
which he did — General Funston and he have continued 
to miss what might have been a real pleasure to them 
both. The following is, as briefly as I can dispose of it, 
the story of the capture of Aguinaldo on March 23, 
1901. 

Ever since Aguinaldo had escaped through our lines 
in November, 1899, his capture had been the one great 
consummation most devoutly wished. It has already 
been shown how busy with the war the army was all 
the time Judge Taft was gayly jogging away astride of 
his peace hobby about the insurrection being really 
quite regretted and over. However, in the favorite 
remark with which he used to wave the insurrection 
into thin air, to the effect that it was now merely "a 
Mafia on a large scale, " there was one element of truth. 
The general feeling of the people, both educated and 
uneducated, w r as such as to countenance the attitude 
of the leaders that pro-American tendencies were 

1 Correspondence Relating to War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1249. 



The Taft Commission 333 

treason. Any leader who surrendered of course was 
thereafter an object of at least some suspicion to his 
fellow-countrymen, however assiduous his subsequent 
double-dealing. As long as Aguinaldo remained out, 
this state of affairs was sure to continue indefinitely, 
possibly for years to come. If captured, he would 
probably himself give up the struggle, and use his 
influence with the rest to do likewise. Therefore, in 
the spring of 1901, each and every one of General 
MacArthur's 70,000 men was, and had been since 1899, 
on the qui vive to make his own personal fortunes secure 
for life, and gain lasting military distinction, by taking 
any sort of chances to capture Aguinaldo. On Febru- 
ary 8, 1 90 1, an officer of General Funston's district, the 
Fourth, in central Luzon, intercepted a messenger bear- 
ing despatches from Aguinaldo to one of his generals 
of that region, directing the general (Lacuna) to send 
some reinforcements to him, Aguinaldo. General 
Funston's headquarters were then at San Fernando, 
in the province of Pampanga — organized as a "civil" 
government province by act of the Taft Commission 
just five days later. l Through these despatches and 
their bearer, General Funston ascertained the hiding- 
place of the insurgent chieftain to be at a place 
called Palanan, in the mountains of Isabela Prov- 
ince, in northeastern Luzon, near the Pacific Coast. 
Early in the war we had availed ourselves of a certain 
tribe, or clan, known as the Maccabebes, who look 
nowise different from all other Filipinos, but who had, 
under the Spanish government, by reason of long-stand- 
ing feuds with their more rebellious neighbors, come to 
be absolutely loyal to the Spanish authorities. When 
we came they had transferred that loyalty to us, and 

1 See Public Laws, U. S. Philippine Commission Division of Insular 
Affairs, War Department, Washington, 1901, p. 181. , 



334 American Occupation of Philippines 

had now become a recognized and valuable part of our 
military force. So it occurred to General Funston, 
"Why not personate the reinforcements called for, the 
American officers to command the expedition assuming 
the role of captured American prisoners?" The plan 
was submitted to General MacArthur and adopted. 
A picked company of Maccabebes was selected, consist- 
ing of about eighty men, and General Funston decided 
to go himself, taking with him on the perilous expedition 
four young officers of proven mettle: Captain Harry W. 
Newton, 34th Infantry, U. S. Volunteers, now a captain 
of the Coast Artillery; Captain R. T. Hazzard, nth 
Volunteer Cavalry; Lieutenant O. P. M. Hazzard, his 
brother, of the same regiment, the latter now an officer 
of the regular army, and Lieutenant Mitchell, "my 
efficient aid." 1 March 6, 1901, the U.S.S. Vicksburg 
slipped quitely out of Manila Bay, bearing the partici- 
pants in the desperate enterprise — as desperate an under- 
taking as the heart and brain of a soldier ever carried 
to a successful conclusion. General Thomas H. Barry 
wrote Secretary of War Root, after they left, telling of 
their departure, and stating that he did not much expect 
ever to see them again. The chances were ten to one 
that the eighty men would meet five or ten times their 
number, and, as they were to masquerade as troops of 
the enemy, they could not complain, under the recog- 
nized laws of war as to spies, at being summarily shot 
if captured alive. And the whole Filipino people were 
a secret service ready to warn Aguinaldo, should the 
carefully concocted ruse be discovered anywhere along 
the journey. They went dow T n to the southern end of 
Luzon, and through the San Bernardino Straits into the 
Pacific Ocean, and thence up the east coast of Luzon to 

1 See General Funston's article on "The Capture of Aguinaldo," 
which appeared in Scribner's Magazine for November, 191 1. 



The Taft Commission 335 

Casiguran Bay, about 100 miles south of Palanan, land- 
ing at Casiguran Bay, March 14th. The "little Macks, " 
as General Funston calls the Maccabebes, were made 
to discard their dapper American uniforms after they 
got aboard the ship, and don instead a lot of non- 
descript clothing gathered by the military authorities 
at Manila before the Vicksburg sailed, so as to resemble 
the average insurgent command. Not a man of them 
had been told of the nature of the expedition before 
sailing. This was not for fear of treachery, but lest 
some one of the faithful "Macks " should get his tongue 
loosed by hospitality before departing. Also, their 
Krag-Jorgensen regulation rifles were taken from them, 
and a miscellaneous assortment of old Springfields, 
Mausers, etc., given them instead, to complete the 
deception. An ex-insurgent officer, well known to 
Aguinaldo, but now in General Funston's employ, was 
to play the role of commanding officer of the "rein- 
forcements." To read General Funston's account of 
this expedition is a more convincing rebuttal of the 
contemporaneous Taft denials of Filipino hostility and 
of the unanimity of the feeling of the people against us, 
than a thousand quotations from official documents 
could ever be. It was necessary to land more than 
100 miles south of Aguinaldo 's hiding-place, lest the 
smoke of the approaching vessel should be sighted 
from a distance, and some peasant or lookout give the 
alarm. Accordingly, they landed at Casiguran Bay 
by night, with the ship's lights screened, the Vicksburg 
at once departing out of sight of land, and agreeing to 
meet them off Palanan, their destination, on March 
25th, eleven days later. From the beginning they 
vigilantly and consummately played the role planned, 
the "Macks" having been drilled on the way up, each 
and all, in the story they were to tell at the first village 



33 6 American Occupation of Philippines 

near Casiguran Bay, and everywhere thereafter, to the 
effect that they had come across country, and en route 
had met ten American soldiers out map-making, and 
had killed two, wounded three, and captured five. They 
were to point to General Funston and the four other 
Americans in corroboration of their story. Speaking 
of himself and his four fellow "prisoners," General 
Funston says, "We were a pretty scrubby looking lot 
of privates. " The villagers received the patriot forces, 
thus flushed with triumph, in an appropriate manner, 
and supplied them with rations and guides for the rest 
of their ioo-mile journey to the headquarters of the 
"dictator." General Funston is even at pains to say 
for the village officials that they were very humane and 
courteous to himself and the other four American 
"prisoners." They reached Palanan Bay, eight miles 
from Palanan, on March 22 d. Here Hilario Tal Placido, 
the ex-insurgent officer whose role in the present 
thrilling drama was that of "commanding officer" of 
the expedition, sent a note to Aguinaldo, stating that 
he had halted his command for a rest at the beach 
preparatory to marching inland and reporting to the 
Honorable Presidente, that they were very much ex- 
hausted, and much in need of food, and please to send 
him some. Of course that was the natural card to play 
to put Aguinaldo off his guard. The food came, and 
the bearers returned and casually reported to the 
Honorable Presidente that his honorable reinforce- 
ments would soon be along, much to the honorable joy 
—to make the thing a little Japanesque — of the presi- 
dent of the honorable republic. This incident has 
been since made the occasion of some criticism — that it 
was contrary to decency to accept Aguinaldo' s food and 
then attack him afterwards. General Funston very 
properly replies in effect that the case would have been 



The Taft Commission 337 

very different had he thrown himself on Aguinaldo's 
mercy, taken his food, and used treachery afterwards, 
but that his conduct was entirely correct, under the 
code of war, for the reason that should he and his com- 
mand be captured while personating enemy's forces, 
Aguinaldo would have had a perfect right, under the 
rules of the game, to shoot them all as spies. He adds 
rather savagely, concerning "certain ladylike persons 
in the United States" who have censured his course in 
the matter, that he "would be very much interested in 
seeing the results of a surgical operation performed on 
the skull of a man who cannot readily see the radical 
difference between the two propositions, " and that he 
doubts if a good quality of calf brains would be revealed 
by the operation. 

At all events, the expedition was very much refreshed 
by the food and highly delighted at the proof, con- 
tained in the sending of it, that Aguinaldo did not 
suspect a ruse. But now came one of the many emergen- 
cies which had to be met by quick wit in the course of 
that memorable adventure. Aguinaldo sent word to 
leave the " prisoners" under a guard in one of the huts 
by the sea-shore, where there was one of the Aguinaldo 
retainers in charge, an old Tagalo. After a hurried, 
whispered conversation, "prisoner" Funston instructed 
"Commanding Officer" Placido to go ahead with his 
main column and then a little later send back a forged 
written order purporting to be from Aguinaldo, for the 
"prisoners" to come on also. This was shown to the 
old Tagalo, thus disarming suspicion on his part. But 
now came the "closest shave" they had. The column 
met a detachment from Aguinaldo's headquarters sent 
down with instructions to relieve the necessarily worn- 
out guard of the newly arrived u re-inforcements " that 
were supposed to be guarding the five prisoners at the 



33 8 American Occupation of Philippines 

beach, and let said guard come on up to headquarters 
with the rest of the " re-inforcements, " the idea being 
to still leave the prisoners at the beach so they would 
not learn definitely as to the Aguinaldo whereabouts. 
Detaining the officer commanding this detachment for 
a moment or so on some pretext, the " Commanding 
Officer " of the ' ' re-inf orcements " whispered to a Macca- 
bebe corporal to run back and tell General Funston. 
and the rest of the ' ' prisoners ' ' to jump in the bushes and 
hide. This they did, lying within thirty feet of the 
detachment, as it passed them en route for the beach. 
Of course a fight would have meant considerable firing, 
and the quarry might hear it, take fright, and escape. 
Finally they reached Palanan, the "prisoners" quite 
far in the rear. Placido got safely into Aguinaldo 's 
presence, followed at a short distance by the main body 
of his Maccabebes. Aguinaldo's life-guard of some 
fifty men, neatly uniformed, presented arms as Placido 
entered the insurgent headquarters building, and there- 
after waited at attention outside. Then the worthy 
Placido entertained the honorable Presidente with a 
few cock-and-bull stories about the march across coun- 
try, etc., made obediently to the President's order, 
keeping a weather eye out of the window all the time. 
As soon as the Maccabebes had come up and formed 
facing the Aguinaldo life-guard, Placido went to the 
window and ordered them to open fire. This they did, 
killing two of the insurgents and wounding their com- 
manding officer. The rest fled, panic-stricken, by 
reason of the surprise. Then Placido, a very stout 
individual, grabbed Aguinaldo, who only weighs about 
115 pounds, threw him down, and sat on him, until 
General Funston, the Hazzards, Mitchell, and Newton 
arrived. The orders were iron-clad that under no cir- 
cumstances, if it could be avoided, was Aguinaldo to 



The Taft Commission 339 

be killed. His signature to proclamations telling the 
people to quit the war was going to be needed too much. 
The party rested two days and then set out for the 
coast again, on March 25th, the day the Vicksburg had 
agreed to meet them. " At noon" says General Fun- 
ston, "we again saw the Pacific, and far out on it a wisp 
of smoke — the Vicksburg coming in!" In due course 
they reached Manila Bay. The old palace of the Span- 
ish captains-general, then occupied by our command- 
ing general, is up the Pasig River, accessible from the 
bay by launch. By that method General Funston took 
his precious prisoner to the palace without the know- 
ledge of a soul in the great city of Manila. He arrived 
before General MacArthur had gotten up. In a few 
minutes the General came out. ' ' Where is Aguinaldo ? ' ' 
said he, dryly. He supposed General Funston simply 
had some details to tell, like the commanding officers of 
hundreds of other expeditions that had gone out before 
that on false scents in search of the illustrious but 
elusive Presidente. " Right here in this house," said 
General Funston. General MacArthur could hardly 
believe his ears. A few days later, General Funston 
walked into General MacArthur's office. The latter 
said : "Well, Funston, they do not seem to have thought 
much in Washington of your performance. I am afraid 
you have got into trouble." "At the same time he 
handed me," says General Funston in the Scribner 
Magazine article above mentioned, "a cablegram an- 
nouncing my appointment as a brigadier-general in the 
regular army." 

In his annual report for 1901, 1 General MacArthur 
describes the capture of Aguinaldo as "the most 
momentous single event of the year," stating also that 
"Aguinaldo was the incarnation of the insurrection." 

1 War Department Report, 1901, vol. i. pt., 4, p. 99. 



34° American Occupation of Philippines 

This last statement explains why he was so anxious to 
capture him alive. If dead, he would be sure to get 
re-incarnated in the person of some able assistant of his 
entourage, thus insuring undisturbed continuance of 
the war. He was most graciously treated by General 
MacArthur during his stay as that distinguished 
soldier's " guest" at the Malacanan palace, from March 
28th until April 20th. The word "guest" is placed in 
quotations because the host thought so much of him 
that he considered him worth many hundred times his 
weight in gold, and had him watched night and day by a 
commissioned officer. Everything that had been done 
by the Americans since November, 1899, was explained 
to him, and he was made to see that our purposes with 
regard to his people were not only benevolent but also 
inflexible ; in other words that there was no altering our 
determination to make his people happy whether they 
were willing or not. Seeing this, Aguinaldo bowed to 
the inevitable. The programme explained to Aguinaldo 
is wittily described by a very bright Englishwoman as 
a plan "to have lots of American school teachers at 
once set to work to teach the Filipino English and 
at the same time keep plenty of American soldiers 
around to knock him on the head should he get a 
notion that he is ready for self-government before 
the Americans think he is" — a quaint scheme, she 
adds, "and one characteristic of the dauntlessness of 
American energy . " To be brief, on April 19th, Agui- 
naldo took the oath of allegiance to the American 
Government, which all agree he has faithfully ob- 
served ever since, and issued a proclamation recom- 
mending abandonment of further resistance. This 
proclamation was at once published by General 
MacArthur and signalized by the immediate liberation 
of one thousand prisoners of war, on their likewise 



The Taft Commission 341 

taking the oath of allegiance. In his proclamation 
Aguinaldo said, among other things: 

The time has come, however, when they [the Filipino 
people] find their advance along this path [the path of their 
aspirations] impeded by an irresistible force. * * * Enough 
of blood, enough of tears and desolation. 

He concludes by announcing his final unconditional 
submission to American sovereignty and advises others 
to do likewise. r 

Soon after this General Tino surrendered in General 
Young's district, and in another part of northern 
Luzon, General Mascardo, commanding the insurgent 
forces in the provinces of Bataan and Zambales, hereto- 
fore described as "the west wing of the great central 
plain," also surrendered. In the latter part of June, 
General Cailles, with whom we have already had occa- 
sion to become acquainted, in connection with Judge 
Taft's "Mafia on a large scale," also surrendered in 
Laguna Province. After that, there w r as never any 
more trouble in northern Luzon. But during the 
spring of 1901, the Commission had been very busy 
organizing the provinces of southern Luzon under civil 
government, thus cutting short the process of licking it 
into submission and substituting a process of loving it 
into that state through good salaries and otherwise — 
a policy which postponed the final permanent pacifica- 
tion of that ill-fated region for several years, as herein- 
after more fully set forth. 

The unconditional absoluteness with which Judge 
Taft acted from the beginning on the assumption that 
the Filipinos would make a distinction between civil 
and military rule, and that their objection to us was 

1 For a copy of this proclamation see War Department Report, 1901, 
vol. i., pt. 4, p. 100. 



34 2 American Occupation of Philippines 

because we had first sent soldiers to rule them and not 
civilians, and that these objections would vanish 
before the benignant sunlight of a government by 
civilians, is one of the great tragedies of all history, 
considering the countless lives it eventually cost. As a 
matter of fact, the Filipino objection had little or no 
relation to the kind of clothes we wore, whether they 
were white duck or khaki. Their objection was to us, i.e., 
to an alien yoke. However, to heal the bleeding wounds 
of war, the Filipinos were benevolently told to forget 
it, and a civil government was set up on July 4, 1901, 
pursuant to the amiable delusion indicated. That it 
has never yet proved a panacea, and why, will be devel- 
oped in the next and subsequent chapters, but only in- 
so-far as such development throws light on the present 
situation — which it is the whole object of this book 
to do. 

And now a few words by way of concluding the 
present chapter, as preliminary to the inauguration of 
a civil government, cannot be misconstrued, though 
they come from one who held office under it. I have 
certainly made clear that Judge Taft and his colleagues 
w r ere as honest in their delusion about how popular they 
were with the Filipinos as many other public men who 
have been known to have hobbies, and my remarks 
must be understood as based on the comprehensive 
bird's-eye view which we have had of the whole situa- 
tion from the outbreak of the war with Spain in 1898 
to the end of June, 1901, as a summation of that 
situation. It is quite true that all contemporary history 
is as much affected by its environment as the writer of 
it is by his own limitations. But it certainly seems 
clear now that, in regard to the Philippine problem 
presented in 1898 by the decision to keep the islands, 
the American people were played upon by the poli- 



The Taft Commission 343 

ticians for the next few years thereafter, sometimes on 
the idea that the Filipino people were not a people but 
only a jumble of semi-civilized tribes incapable of any 
intelligent notion of what independence meant, and 
sometimes on the idea that while there was no denying 
that they were indeed a civilized, homogeneous, Chris- 
tian people, yet the great majority of them did not 
want independence, and would prefer to be under a 
strong alien government. But the key-note to the 
McKinley policy from the beginning, his answer to the 
eager question of his own people, was that there was 
no real absence of the consent of the governed. In 
Senator Lodge's history of the war with Spain, written 
in 1899, there is a description of the long struggle 
for independence in Cuba, whose existence Spain 
denied year after year until we decided that patience 
had ceased to be a virtue, which description is so strik- 
ingly applicable to the situation in the Philippines 
during the first years of American rule that I cannot 
refrain from quoting it here: 

And we were to go on pretending that the war was not 
there, and that we had answered the unsettled question, 
when we really had simply turned our heads aside and 
refused to look. And then when the troublesome matter 
had been so nicely laid to sleep, the result followed which is 
usual when Congressmen and Presidents and nations are 
trying to make shams pass for realities." 1 

By the same high token the Philippine question will 
always remain "the unsettled question" until it is 
settled right. In other words, the American occupa- 
tion of the Philippines, having been originally predi- 
cated on the idea that the Filipino people did not really 
want independence, a fiction which political expediency 

1 The War with Spain, by H. C. Lodge, p. 20 



344 American Occupation of Philippines 

incident to government by parties inexorably compelled 
it to try to live up to thereafter, took the form, in 1901, 
of a civil government founded upon a benevolent lie, 
which expressed a hope, not a fact, a hopeless hope that 
can never be a fact. And that is what has been the 
matter with it ever since. 



The papers 'id it 'andsome, 
But you bet the army knows. 



CHAPTER XV 
Governor Taft — 1 901-2 

For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, 
saying — Peace, peace; when there is no peace. Jeremiah viii., n. 

ON February 22, 1898, the American Consul at 
Manila, Mr. Williams, after he had been at that 
post for about a month, wrote the State Department, 
describing the Spanish methods of keeping from the 
world the outward and visible manifestations of the 
desire of the Filipino people to be free from their yoke 
thus: 

Peace was proclaimed and, since my coming, festivities 
therefor were held; but there is no peace, and has been none 
for two years. 

He adds: 

Conditions here and in Cuba are practically alike. War 
exists, battles are of almost daily occurrence, etc. 1 

As will hereinafter appear, this is not far from a 
correct description of the conditions which prevailed 
successively in various provinces of the Philippines in 
gradually lessening degree for the six years next ensuing 
after the report of the Taft Commission of November 
30, 1900, wherein they said: 

1 Mr. Williams to Mr. Cridler, Senate Document 62 (1898), p. 319. 

345 



346 American Occupation of Philippines 

A great majority of the people long for peace and are 
entirely willing to accept the establishment of a government 
under the supremacy of the United States. : 

We have seen how from the date of the outbreak, 
February 4, 1899, to the date of his final departure 
from the islands for the United States on May 5, 1900, 
General Otis had diligently supplied the eager ear of 
Mr. McKinley with his " situation well in hand" and 
"insurrection about to collapse" telegrams, Secretary 
of War Alger having meantime been forced out of the 
cabinet — in part, at least — by a public opinion which 
indignantly believed that the real situation was being 
withheld. We have seen how, from soon after the 
arrival of the Taft Commission at Manila on June 3, 

1900, until after the November elections of that year, 
the same eager presidential ea.r aforesaid was supplied 
with like material through the presumably innocent 
but opportunely deluded optimism of the Commission, 
as manifested in the above sample message; how the 
actual military situation as described by General Mac- 
Arthur, the military commander at the time, was one 
of "desperate resistance by means of a general banding 
of the people in support of the guerrillas in the field, " 2 
he having wired the War Department on January 4, 

1 90 1, "Troops throughout the archipelago more active 
than at any time since November, 1899 " ; 3 an d how this 
had been followed on July 4, 1901 , by a civil government, 
the inauguration of which could by no possibility be con- 
strued as affirming to the people of the United States 
anything other than the existence of a state of peace. 

1 See First Report of Taft Philippine Commission to the Secretary of 
War, p. 17. 

2 General MacArthur's report for 1901, War Department Report, 
1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 90. 

3 Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1241 . 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 347 

We are to trace in this and subsequent chapters how, 
a short time after the civil government was instituted, 
the insurrection got its second wind; how a year later 
came another public declaration of peace, on July 4, 
1902; and how this was followed by a long series of 
public disorders, combated by prosecutions for sedition 
and brigandage, until toward the end of 1906. The 
drama is quite an allegory — Uncle Sam wrestling with 
his guardian angel Consent-of-the-governed. He finally 
gets both the angel's shoulders on the mat, however, 
and so the two have lived at loggerheads in the Philip- 
pines ever since. 

As soon as we had once blundered into the colonial 
business, the rock-bottom frankness with which we so 
dearly love to deal with one another, let carping Europe 
deny it as she will, was superseded by a systematic 
effort on the part of the statesmen responsible for the 
blunder to conceal it. It soon became clear to those 
on the inside that the sovereign American people had 
" bought a gold brick," that is to say, had made a 
grievous mistake and had done wrong. But as it is 
not expedient for courtiers to tell the sovereign he has 
done wrong, because "The king can do no wrong," 
thereafter all the courtiers, — i. e. persons desiring to 
control the " sovereign" while seeming to obey him — 
instead of risking loss of the " royal" favor by boldly 
telling the people they had done wrong and ought to 
mend the error of their ways, began to fill their ears 
and salve their conscience with mediaeval doctrines 
about salvation of the heathen through governmental 
missions maintained by the joint agencies of Cross and 
Sword. For the foregoing and cognate reasons, Sena- 
tor Lodge's description of Spain's last thirty years in 
Cuba fits our first six or seven in the Philippines, 
beginning in 1899 with the original Otis press censor- 



348 American Occupation of Philippines 

ship policy of "not letting anything go that will hurt 
the Administration," and coming on down to a certifi- 
cate made in 1907 by the Philippine Commission for 
consumption in the United States, to the effect that a 
state of general and complete peace had prevailed 
throughout the islands for a stated period preceding 
the certificate, when, as a matter of fact, during the 
period covered by the certificate, an executive pro- 
clamation formally declaring a state of insurrection had 
issued, and the Supreme Court of the islands had upheld 
certain drastic executive action as legal because of the 
state of insurrection recognized by the proclamation. 

The Taft civil government of the Philippines set up 
in 1 901 was an attempt to answer the question which, 
during the crucial period of our country's history fol- 
lowing the Spanish War, rang so persistently through the 
public utterances of both Grover Cleveland and Benja- 
min Harrison: "Mr. President, how are you going to 
square the subjugation of the Philippines with the 
freeing of Cuba?" Mr. McKinley's answer had been, 
in effect: "Never mind about that, Grover; you and 
Benjamin are back numbers. I will show you 'the 
latest thing' in the consent-of-the-governed line, a 
government not 'essentially popular,' it is true, nor 
indeed at all 'popular,' in fact very unpopular, but 
'essentially popular in form. 1 You lads are not 
experts on the political trapeze." Accordingly, as 
Senator Lodge said concerning the dreary years of 
continuous public disorders in Cuba under Spain, 
which we finally put a stop to in U 



We were to go on pretending that the war was not there, 
etc. 

Lack of frankness is usually due to weakness of one 
sort or another. The weakness of the Spanish colonial 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 349 

system lay in the impotent poverty of the home govern- 
ment and the graft tendencies of the colonial officials. 
The weakness of the American colonial system has 
always lain in the fundamental unfitness of republican 
governmental machinery for boldly advocating and 
honestly enforcing doctrines which deny frankly and as 
a matter of course that governments derive their just 
powers from the consent of the governed. There are 
so many people in a republic like ours who will always 
stand by this last proposition as righteous, and as being 
the chief bulwark of their own liberties, and so many 
who will always regard denial of that proposition as an 
insidious practice calculated ultimately to react on their 
own institutions, that no colonial government of con- 
quered subject provinces eager for independence can 
ever have the sympathy and backing of all our people. 
Thus it is that to get home support for the policy, the 
supreme need of the colonial government is constant 
apology for its own existence, and constant effort to 
show that the subject people do not really want free- 
dom to pursue happiness in their own way as badly 
as their orators say they do; that the oratory is mere 
"hot air"; and that the people really like alien domina- 
tion better than they seem to. 

Always in a mental attitude of self-defence against 
home criticism, in its official reports there is ever 
present with the Philippine insular government the 
tendency and temptation not to volunteer to the 
American people evidence within its possession calcu- 
lated to awaken discussion as to the wisdom of its con- 
tinuance. It thus usurps a legitimate function never 
intended to be delegated to the Executive, but reserved 
to the people. It thus makes itself the judge of how 
much the people at home shall know. The law of self- 
preservation prompts it not to take the American 



35° American Occupation of Philippines 

people into its confidence, at least not that portion of 
them who are opposed on principle to holding remote 
colonies impossible to defend in the event of war with- 
out a large standing army maintained for the purpose. 
There is always the apprehension that the value of 
apparently unfavorable evidence will not be wisely 
weighed by the people at home, because of unfamiliarity 
with insular conditions. This is by no means alto- 
gether vicious. It is a perfectly natural attitude and a 
good deal can be said in favor of it. But the real vice 
of it lies in the fact that your colonial government thus 
becomes not unlike the president of a certain naval 
board before which a case involving the commission of 
an officer of the navy was once tried. The}^ had no 
competent official stenographer to take down all that 
transpired. The Navy Department was asked for one, 
but they referred it to the board. The president of the 
board knew very well that "the defence" wanted to 
show bias on his part. He exuded conscious rectitude 
and plainly resented any suggestion of bias. So a 
stenographer was refused and the case proceeded, the 
proceedings being recorded in long hand by a regular 
permanent employee of the board. Under such cir- 
cumstances, there is so much which transpires that is 
absolutely irrelevant and immaterial, that the proceed- 
ings would be interminable if every little thing were 
recorded. Consequently, much that was material, in- 
cluding casual remarks of the president of the board 
clearly indicative of bias sufficient to disqualify any 
judge or juror on earth, failed of entry in the record. 
However, enough was gotten into the record to satisfy 
the President of the United States that the president 
of the board was not only not impartial, but very much 
prejudiced, and he reversed the action of the board. 
The case of that board is very much like the case of the 



Governor Taft — 190 1-2 351 

Philippine Government. The case of the latter is, as 
it were, a case involving a question as to how long a 
guardianship ought to continue, and they simply fail 
and omit to have recorded in a form where it may be 
available to the reviewing authority, the American 
people, much that is material (on the idea of saving the 
reviewing authority labor and trouble), which they 
think the record ought not to be cumbered with, or the 
reviewing authority bothered with. This practice is 
due to a confident belief that the American people, 
being so far away, and being necessarily so wholly 
unacquainted with all the ins and outs of the situation 
in the Philippines, are not fitted to pass intelligently 
on the questions which continually confront the colonial 
government. This is not a mental attitude of insult 
to the intelligence of the people of the United States. 
It is simply a belief that they, the colonial officials, 
know much better than the American people can ever 
know, what is wisest, in each case, to be done in the 
premises. And there is much to be said in favor of this 
view, so far as details go. The fundamental error of it, 
however, lies in the assumption that the American 
people are forever committed to permanent retention 
of the Philippines, i. e., permanent so far as any living 
human being is concerned — an assumption wholly 
unauthorized by any declaration of the law-making 
power of this government, and countenanced only by 
the oft-expressed hope of President Taft that that will 
be the policy some day declared, if any definite policy 
is ever declared. Thus it is that throughout the last 
twelve years those particular facts and events which 
(to me) seem most vitally relevant to the fundamental 
question in the case, viz., whether or not we should 
continue to persist in the original blunder of inaugurat- 
ing and maintaining a — to all intents and purposes — 



!/ 



35 2 American Occupation of Philippines 

permanent over-seas colonial government, have been 
withheld from the knowledge of the American public. 
The present policy of indefinite retention with unde- 
clared intention is a mere makeshift to avoid a frank 
avowal of intention to retain the islands for all future 
time with which anybody living has any practical 
concern. Until it is substituted by a definite declara- 
tion by Congress similar to the one we made in the case 
of Cuba, and the present American Governor- General 
and his associates are substituted by men sent out to 
report back how soon they think the Filipinos may 
safely be trusted to attend to their own domestic con- 
cerns, all crucial facts and situations that might jeop- 
ardize the continuance of the present American regime 
in the Philippines will continue, as heretofore, to re- 
main unmentioned in the official reports of the Ameri- 
can authorities now out there. Until that is done, you 
will never hear the Filipino side of the case from anybody 
whose opinion you are willing to make the basis of gov- 
ernmental action. These remarks will, obviously from 
the nature of the case, be quite as true long after Presi- 
dent Taft, the reader, and I are dead as they are now. 
Mr. Taft would be very glad to have Congress 
declare frankly that it is the purpose of this Govern- 
ment to hold the Philippines permanently, i. e., per- 
manently so far as the word means continuance of 
the "uplift " treatment long after everybody now on the 
earth is beneath it. But because public opinion in the 
United States is so much divided as to the wisdom of 
a policy of frankly avowed intention permanently to 
retain the islands, he prefers to leave the whole matter 
open and undetermined, so as to get the support both 
of those who think a definite programme of permanent 
retention righteous and those who think such a pro- 
gramme vicious. He wishes to please both sides of a 



Governor Taft — 190 1-2 353 

moral issue, on the idea that, as the present policy is in 
his individual judgment best for all concerned, the end 
justifies the means. Yet, as the issue is a moral one, 
which concerns the cause of representative government 
throughout the world, and a strategic one which con- 
cerns the national defence, it should, in my judgment, 
no longer be dodged, but squarely met. You con- 
stantly hear President Taft talking quite out loud here 
at home, in his public utterances, about the great 
politico-missionary work we are doing in the Philip- 
pines by furnishing them with the most approved 
up-to-date methods for the pursuit of happiness, the 
avoidance of graft in government, the elimination of 
crimes of violence, in short the ideal way to minimize 
the ills that human governments are heir to, while every 
day and every dollar spent out there by Americans 
induced by him to go there, are time and money tensely 
arrayed against the ultimate independence he purports 
to favor. Give the Americans out there a square deal. 
Let them know whether we are going to keep the islands 
or whether we are not. Honesty is a far better policy 
than the present policy. The Americans in the islands, 
Mr. Taft's agents in the Philippines, talk no uncandid 
and misleading stuff about the Philippines being exclu- 
sively for the Filipinos. And they do considerable talk- 
ing. They need looking after, if the present pious fiction 
is to be kept up at this end of the line. Nobody in the 
Philippines to-day, among the Americans, considers talk 
about independence as anything other than political 
buncombe very hampering to their work. Listen to 
this high official of the insular government, who writes 
in the North American Review for February, 1912: 

The somewhat blatant note with which we at the 
beginning proclaimed our altruistic purposes in the Philip- 
23 



354 American Occupation of Philippines 

pines has died away into a whisper. To say much about it is 
to incur a charge of hypocrisy. 1 

The most important problem which confronted Mr. 
McKinley when he sent Judge Taft to the Philippines 
was how to so handle the supreme question of public 
order as to avoid any necessity of having to ask Con- 
gress later for more volunteers to replace those whose 
terms of enlistment would expire June 30, 1901. We 
have already reviewed the strenuous efforts of General 
MacArthur during the twelve months immediately 
following the arrival of the Taft Commission in June. 
1900, to get rid of the shadow of this necessity by the 
date named, the regular army having been reorganized 
meantime and considerably increased by the Act of 
February 2, 1901. On March 22, 1901, while the Taft 
Commission was going around the islands with their 
Federal party folk, holding out the prospect of office to 
those who would quit insurging and come in and be 
good, General MacArthur reported progress to Secre- 
tary of War Root by cable as follows: "Hope report 
cessation of hostilities before June 30. " 2 His idea was 
to get a good military grip on the situation, if possible, 
by that time, and, as a corollary, of course, that the 
grip thus obtained should be diligently retained for a 
long time, not loosened, so that the disturbed conditions 
incident to many years of war might have a few years, 
at least, in which to settle. In his annual report dated 
July 4, 1 901, the date of the inauguration of Judge Taft 
as "Civil Governor, " he says, in regard to the imperative 
necessity for continuing the military grip by keeping 
on hand sufficient forces : 

1 J. R. Arnold, of the Philippine Civil Service Board, in North Ameri- 
can Review, for February, 19 12. 

2 Correspondence Relating to War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1261. 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 355 

Anything in the immediate future calculated to impede 
the activity or reduce the efficiency of these instruments 
will not only be a menace to the present, but put in jeopardy 
the entire future of American possibilities in the archipelago. 1 

General MacArthur believed in keeping the islands 
permanently. His views were frankly imperialistic. 
He had no salve to offer to the conscience of pious 
thrift at home anxious to believe that the Filipinos were 
not bitterly opposed to our rule, and very much in 
favor of what was supposed to be a glittering opening 
for Trade Expansion. He was thoroughly imbued with 
the British colonial idea known as The White Man's 
Burden. On the other hand, Governor Taft firmly 
believed that kindness would cure the desire of the 
people for independence. The difference between these 
two gentlemen was fully ventilated afterward before the 
Senate Committee of 1902. A statement of General 
MacArthur's embodying the crux of this difference was 
read to Governor Taft by Senator Carmack, and the 
Governor's reply was : 

We did not then agree with that statement, and we do 
not now agree with it. 2 

A little later, in the same connection, he said to the 
same Senate Committee, with the cheery tolerance of 
conflicting views which comes only from entire confi- 
dence in the soundness of one's own : 

I have been called the Mark Tapley of this Philippine 
business. 

There is no doubt about the fact that President Taft 
is an optimist. But while optimism is a very blessed 

1 War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 98. 

2 Senate Document 331, pt. 1, 57th Congress, 1st Session, 1902, p. 136. 



35 6 American Occupation of Philippines 

thing in a sick-room or a financial panic, it is a very 
poor substitute for powder and lead in putting down 
an insurrection, or in weaning people from a desire for 
independence accentuated by a long war waged for 
that purpose, especially when your kindness must be 
accompanied by assurances to the objects of it that on 
account of a lack of sufficient intelligence they are not 
fit for the thing they want. It was upon a programme 
of this sort that Governor Taft entered upon the task of 
reconciling the Filipinos to American rule more than 
ten years ago. The impossibility of the task is of 
course obvious enough from the mere statement of it. 
The subsequent bitterness between him and the military 
authorities was quite carefully and very properly kept 
from the American public because it might get back to 
the Filipino public. The military folk knew that to go 
around the country setting up provincial and municipal 
governments, carrying a liberal pay-roll, with diligent 
contemporaneous circulation of the knowledge that 
anybody who would quit fighting would stand a good 
chance to get an office, would seem to many of the 
Filipinos a confession of weakness and fear, sure to 
cause trouble later. Many of them — of course it would 
be inappropriate to mention names — simply did not 
believe that Mr. Taft was honest in his absurd notion. 
They simply damned " politics" for meddling with war, 
and let it go at that. But the real epic pathos of the 
whole thing was that Mr. Taft was actually sincere. 
He believed that the majority of the Philippine people 
were for him and his policies. As late as 1905, he 
seems to have clung to this idea, according to various 
accounts by Senators Newlands, Dubois, and others, in 
magazine articles written after their return from a trip 
to the Philippines in that year in company with Mr. 
Taft, then Secretary of War. In fact so impressed were 



Governor Taft — 190 1-2 357 

they with the general discontent out there, and yet so 
considerate of their good friend Mr. Taft's feelings in 
the matter and his confidence that the Filipinos loved 
benevolent alien domination, that one of them simply 
contented himself with the remark: 

When we left the islands I do not believe there was a 
single member of our party who was not sorry we own them, 
except Secretary Taft himself. 

Indeed it is not until 1907 that, we find Mr. Taft's 
paternal solicitude for his step-daughter, Miss Filipina, 
finally reconciling itself to the idea that while this 
generation seems to want Home Rule as irreconcilably 
as Ireland herself and "wont be happ}^ 'til it gets it," 
yet inasmuch as Home Rule is not, in his judgment, 
good for every people, this generation is therefore a 
wicked and perverse generation, and hence the Filipinos 
must simply resign themselves to the idea of being 
happy in some other generation. This attitude was 
freely stated before the Millers' convention at St. 
Louis, May 30, 1907, the speech being reported in the 
St. Louis Globe-Democrat the next day. Said Mr. Taft 
on that occasion, after admitting that the Islands had 
been a tremendous financial drain on us: 

If, then, we have not had material recompense, have we 
had it in the continuing gratitude of the people whom we 
have aided? 

Answering this, in effect, though not in so many 
words, " Alas, no, " he adds, with a sigh which is audible 
between the lines: 

He who would measure his altruism by the thankful- 
ness of those whom he aids, will not persist in good 
works. 



358 American Occupation of Philippines 

Thus we see the Mark Tapley optimism of 1902 
become in 1907 a species of solicitude which Dickens 
describes in Bleak House as "Telescopic Philanthropy, " 
in the chapter by that title in which he introduces the 
famous Mrs. Jellyby, mother of a large and interesting 
family, "a lady of very remarkable strength of charac- 
ter, who devotes herself entirely to the public," who 
"has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public 
subjects, at various times, and is at present devoted to 
the subject of Africa, with a general view to the cultiva- 
tion of the coffee berry — and the natives, " — to the woeful 
neglect of her own domestic concerns and her large and 
expensive family of children. Since 1907, Mr. Taft 
has frankly abandoned his early delusion about the 
consent-of-the-governed, and boldly takes the position, 
up to that time more or less evaded, that the consent of 
the governed is not at all essential to just government. 

The apotheosis of Uncle Sam as Mrs. Jellyby is to be 
found in one of Mr. Taft's speeches wherein he declared 
that the present Philippine policy was "a plan for the 
spread of Christian civilization in the Orient. " 

Thus has it been that, under the reactionary influence 
of a colonial policy, this republic has followed its frank 
abandonment of the idea that all just government must 
derive its origin in the consent of the governed by a 
further abandonment of the idea that Church and State 
should be kept separate. I do not wish to make Presi- 
dent Taft ridiculous, and could not if I would. Nor do 
I seek to belittle him in the eyes of his people, — for we 
are "his people," for the time being. No one can 
belittle him. He is too big a man to be belittled by 
anybody. Besides, he is, in many respects beyond all 
question, a truly great man. But he is not the only 
great man in history who has made egregious blunders. 
And there is no question that we are running there on 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 359 

the confines of Asia, in the Philippines, a superfluous 
governmental kindergarten whose sessions should be 
concluded, not suddenly, but without unnecessary 
delay. The two principal reasons for retaining the 
Filipinos as subjects, or " wards, " or by whatever 
euphemism any one may prefer to designate the relation, 
are, first, that a Filipino government would not properly 
protect life and property, and second, that although 
they complain much at taxation without representation 
through tariff and other legislation placed or kept on 
the statute books of Congress through the influence 
and for the benefit of special interests in the United 
States, yet that such taxation without representation 
is not so grievous as to justify them in feeling as we 
did in 1776. Whether these reasons for retaining 
the Filipinos as subjects indefinitely are justified by the 
facts, must depend upon the facts. If they are not, the 
question will then arise, " Would a Filipino government 
be any worse for the Filipinos than the one we are 
keeping saddled on them over their protest?" 

In his letter of instructions of April 7, 1900, to the 
Taft Commission, Mr. McKinley first quoted the noble 
concluding language with which the articles of capitula- 
tion of the city of Manila gave an immediate and su- 
premely comforting sense of security to a city of some 
three hundred thousand people who had then been 
continuously in terror of their lives for three and one 
half months, thus : 

This city, its inhabitants, * * * and its private property 
of all description * * * are placed under the special 
safeguard of the faith and honor of the American army; 

and then added : 

As high and sacred an obligation rests upon the Govern- 
ment of the United States to give protection for property 



360 American Occupation of Philippines 

and life * * * to all the people of the Philippine Islands. 
* * * I charge this commission to labor for the full per- 
formance of this obligation, which concerns the honor and 
conscience of their country. 

How the premature setting up of the civil govern- 
ment of the Philippines in 1901 under pressure of 
political expediency, and the consequent withdrawal 
of the police protection of the army, was followed by a 
long series of disorders combated by prosecutions for 
sedition and brigandage, toward the end of which the 
writer broke down and left the Islands exclaiming 
inwardly, "I do not know the method of drawing an 
indictment against a whole people, ' ' will now be traced, 
not so much to show that the Philippine insular govern- 
ment has failed properly and competently to meet the 
most sacred obligations that can rest upon any govern- 
ment, but to show the inherent unfitness of a govern- 
ment based on the consent of the governed to run any 
other kind of a government. 

There were five officers of the Philippine volunteer 
army of 1 899-1 901 appointed to the bench by Governor 
Taft in 1901. Their names and the method of their 
transition from the military to the civil regime are 
indicated by the following communication, a copy of 
which was furnished to each, as indicated in the endorse- 
ment which follows the signature of Judge Taft : 

UNITED STATES PHILIPPINE COMMISSION 

President's Office, Manila, June 17, 1901. 

Major-General Arthur MacArthur, U. S. A., 

Military Governor of the Philippine Islands, Manila. 

Sir: 

I am directed by the commission to inform you that it has made the 
following appointments under the recent Judicial Act passed June 11, 
1901: 



Governor Taft — 190 1-2 361 

You will observe that among our appointees are five army officers: 
Brigadier General James F. Smith, Lieutenant James H. Blount, Jr., 
29th Infantry, Captain Adam C. Carson, 28th Infantry; Captain 
Warren H. Ickis, 36th Infantry; and Lieutenant George P. Whitsett, 
32 d Infantry. 

It is suggested that it would be well for these officers to resign their 
positions in the United States military service to the end that they may 
accept the civil positions, take the oath of office, and immediately begin 
their new duties. 

I have the honor to be, very respectfully, 

Your obedient servant, 

{Signed) Wm. H. Taft, 

President. 

Official extract copy respectfully furnished Lieutenant James H. 
Blount, Jr., 29th Infantry, U. S. Vols., Manila, P. I. Your resignation, 
if offered in compliance with above letter, will be accepted upon the 
date preferred. 

By command of Major-General MacArthur: 

{Signed) E. H. Crowder 
Lieutenant-Colonel and Judge Advocate, U. S. A. 
Secretary. 

Military Secretary's Office, 
June 18, 1901. 

General Smith had come out as colonel of the 1st 
Californias, and had won his stars on the field of battle, 
as has already been described in an earlier chapter. 
He went from the army to the Supreme Bench — at 
Manila. The archipelago had been divided by the 
Taft Commission into fifteen judicial districts, contain- 
ing three or four provinces each, — each district court to 
be a nisi prius or trial court. Judge Carson (Va.) went 
to the Hemp Peninsula District in the extreme south 
of Luzon, already described, and four years later to the 
Supreme Bench, where he still is. Judge Ickis (la.) 
went to Mindanao, and later died of the cholera down 
there. Judge Whitsett (Mo.) went to Jolo (the little 
group of islets near British North Borneo), but his 
wife died soon afterward, and he resigned and came 



362 American Occupation of Philippines 

home. The writer (Ga.) went to northern Luzon, to 
the First District hereinafter noticed. 

Just here it may be remarked that the reader will 
need no long complicated description of the details of 
the organization of the new government, interspersed 
with unpronounceable names, if he will simply assume 
the view-point Governor Taft had in the beginning. 
Governor Taft simply analogized his situation to that 
of a governor of a State or Territory at home. His 
fifty provinces were to him fifty counties, twenty-five 
of them in the main island of Luzon, which, as heretofore 
stated, is about the size of Ohio or Cuba (forty odd 
thousand square miles), and contains half the popula- 
tion and over one-third the total land area of the archi- 
pelago. However, each of his provincial governors 
was liberally paid, and the authority of a governor of a 
province was, on a small scale, more like that of one of 
our own state chief executives than like the authority 
and functions of the chairman of the Board of County 
Commissioners of a county with us. For instance, the 
governorship of Cebu, with its 2000 square miles of 
territory and 650,000 inhabitants, was quite as big a 
job as the governorship of New Mexico, or some other 
one of our newer States. 

So that the task on which Governor Taft entered 
July 4, 1 90 1, was the governing of a potential ultimate 
federal union in miniature, containing nearly eight 
millions of people. One slight mistake I think he made 
was in providing that the governors of the provinces 
should be ex-ofncio sheriffs of the Courts of First 
Instance (of the fifteen several judicial districts afore- 
said). This was to enable the Judges of First Instance 
to keep a weather eye on the provincial governors, the 
judiciary at first being largely American, and it being 
the programme to have native governors, some of them 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 363 

recently surrendered insurgent generals, as rapidly as 
practicable and advisable. The scheme was good busi- 
ness, but not tactful. It subtracted some wind from 
the gubernatorial sails to be a sheriff, a provincial 
governor under the Spanish regime having been quite 
a vice-regal potentate. But the judges were as careful 
to treat their native governors with the consideration 
the authority vested in them called for as Governor 
Taft himself would have been. So no substantial harm 
was done, and the real power in the provinces of ques- 
tionable loyalty remained where it belonged, in Ameri- 
can hands. 

Just after Governor Taft's inauguration, the four 
newly appointed district judges just out of the army 
called on the governor. Judge Carson was the spokes- 
man, though without pre-arrangement. He said: 
"Governor, we have called to pay our respects and say 
goodbye before going to the provinces. We have been 
acting under military orders so long, that while we are 
not here to get orders, we would like to have any parting 
suggestions that may occur to you." Governor Taft 
said: "Well, Gentlemen, all I can think of is to remind 
you that if what we have all heard is true the Spanish 
courts usually operated to the delay of justice, rather 
than to the dispensing of it. So just go ahead to your 
respective districts, and get to work, remembering that 
you are Americans." So we did. Of course none of 
us loaned ourselves for a moment to the amiable Taft 
fiction that "the great majority of the people are 
entirely willing to government under the supremacy of 
the United States." We had all had a share in the 
subjugation of the Islands as far as it had progressed 
at that time, and had seen the Filipinos fight — unskil- 
fully and ineffectively, it is true (because they none of 
them understood the use of two sights on a rifle, and 



364 American Occupation of Philippines 

simply could not hit us much), but pluckily enough. 
We knew the Filipinos well, and our attitude was 
simply that of "Pharaoh and the Sergeant,'' in Kip- 
ling's ballad of the conquest of Egypt. However, we 
knew nothing of the Egyptians, except what we had 
learned in the Bible, gave no thought to whether our 
occupation was to be " temporary" like the British 
occupation of Egypt since 1882, or temporary like the 
American occupation of Cuba in 1898. That was a 
matter for the people of the United States to determine 
later. But somebody had to govern the Islands, and 
there we were, and there were the Islands. In the 
scheme of things some one had to do that part of the 
world's work, and, as the salaries were liberal, we went 
to the work, not concerning ourselves with amiable 
fictions of any kind. I think our attitude was really 
one of more intimately sympathetic understanding of 
the Filipinos than that of Governor Taft himself, 
because we had all known them longer, and all spoke 
their language, i. e., the language of the educated and 
representative men (Spanish), and knew their ways, 
their foibles, and their many indisputably noble traits. 
But we did not start out to play the part of political 
wet-nurses. Our attitude was, if Mr. Filipino does not 
behave, we will make him. 

Judge Carson and myself had one peculiar qualifica- 
tion for fidelity to the Taft policies for which we were 
entitled to no credit. We instinctively resented any 
suggestion comparing the Filipinos to negroes. We 
had many warm friends among the Filipinos, had 
shared their generous hospitality often, and in turn had 
extended them ours. Any such suggestion as that 
indicated implied that we had been doing something 
equivalent to eating, drinking, dancing, and chumming 
with negroes. And we resented such suggestions with 



Governor Taft — 190 1-2 365 

an anger quite as cordial and intense as the canons of 
good taste and loyal friendship demanded. I really 
believe that the southern men in the Philippines have 
always gotten along better with the Filipinos than any 
other Americans out there, and for the reasons just 
suggested. Not only is the universal American willing- 
ness to treat the educated Asiatic as a human being 
endowed with certain unalienable rights going to redeem 
him from the down- trodden condition into which British 
and other European contempt for him has kept him, 
but the American from the South out there is a guaran- 
tee that he shall never be treated as if he were an 
African. The African is aeons of time behind the 
Asiatic in development; the latter is aeons ahead of us 
in the mere duration of his civilization. The Filipino 
has many of the virtues both of the European and the 
Asiatic. Christianity has made him the superior in 
many respects, of his neighbor and racial cousin, the 
Japanese. And Spanish civilization has produced 
among them many educated gentlemen whom it is an 
honor to call friend. 

The five lawyers, who on ceasing to be volunteer 
officers became judges, had other incentives also to 
make the Taft Government a success. The possession 
of power is always pleasant. We knew the military 
folk were going to stand by and watch the civil govern- 
ment, and prophesy failure. This of course put us on 
our metal to impress upon the dictatorial gentry of the 
military profession, with didactic firmness, the funda- 
mental importance to all American ideals that the 
military should be subordinate to the civil authority. 

The First Judicial District to which the writer was 
first assigned comprised four provinces, Ilocos Norte, 
in the Ilocano country, the province situated at the 
extreme northwestern corner of Luzon, in the military 



366 American Occupation of Philippines 

district the conquest of which by General Young has 
already been fully described; and the three provinces 
of the Cagayan valley, * overrun by Captain Batchelor 
on his remarkable march from the mountains to the sea 
in November, 1899, a l so already described. Here I 
remained for a year, and then came home on leave, 
desperately ill ; being given, on returning to the Islands 
after my recovery, an assignment in one of the southern 
islands, hereinafter dealt with. 

We volunteers were all commissioned as judges as of 
the 15th of June, though none of us I believe were 
mustered out until June 30th. The day after I was noti- 
fied of my appointment as judge, as above set forth, 
desiring to enter upon my judicial emoluments, which 
were several times those I was receiving as a soldier, I 
removed the shoulder-straps and collar ornaments from 
my white duck suit, and went over and took the oath 
of office before the Chief Justice of the Islands. We 
had not yet been mustered out of the army, but as 
above stated, Governor Taft had suggested to General 
Mac Arthur that we resign without waiting for the day 
of muster out, so we could get to work that much 
sooner, and General MacArthur had notified us that if 
we cared to resign at once as suggested, he would cable 
our resignations to Washington. Immediately after 
qualifying before the Chief Justice, I left his office and 
on emerging from the court-house hailed a carromata, 2 
but the driver said No, he would not carry me, I 
suggested in a very rudimental way, in rather rudimen- 
tal Spanish suited to him, that he was a common car- 
rier, and as such under a duty to transport me. He 
said his horse was tired. His horse did not look tired. 
He would not have thus casually toyed with veracity 

1 Cagayan, Isabela, and Nueva Vizcaya. 

2 A kind of two-wheeled buggy, the principal public vehicle of Manila. 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 367 

if I had had my shoulder-straps on. An alitor idad 
(a representative of constituted authority) is to the 
masses of the Filipino people something which instinc- 
tively challenges their respect and obedience, more 
especially where the ''authority" is firm and just, 
Respect for authority is their most conspicuous civic 
trait, and it is on this element in the lower ninety, on 
the intelligence and capacity to guide them of the upper 
ten, and on the ardent patriotism of both, that I predi- 
cate my difference with President Taft as to the capacity 
of the Filipino people for self-government. However, 
as I was to all appearances not an ' 'authority," this 
ignorant man treated me as merely one of the Americans 
who, having invaded his country, apparently were not 
sure whether they were afraid of his people or not. 
Again I tried diplomacy, offering him an exorbitant 
fare. "Nothing doing." It was about siesta time, 
and he would not budge. Here then was the civil 
government proposition in a nutshell, to take the 
ignorant people and teach them their rights under 
theoretically free institutions, instead of letting their 
own people do it in their own way; to reason directly 
with such people as this cochero (hackman), to begin at 
the bottom of the social scale right on the jump, the 
idea being to fit them, the sacred (?) majority, to know 
their rights and "knowing dare maintain " them against 
the educated minority, as if the latter did not have 
a greater natural interest in their welfare than any 
stranger could possibly have. That I indulged all these 
reflections at the time I of course do not mean to say. 
The significance of the incident has of course deepened 
in the light of the subsequent years. At any rate, I 
did not succeed in budging that cochero. I walked 
home, forego the difference between the military and 
the judicial salary for the two weeks remaining before 



368 American Occupation of Philippines 

muster-out day, put my shoulder-straps back on, and 
kept them on until June 30, 1901. 1 

When I first landed on the China seacoast of the 
district I was to preside over, I was met by quite a 
reception committee of the leading men, who conducted 
me with great courtesy to the provincial capital. A 
little later the justices of the peace paid their respects. 
One of them came thirty miles to do so. The court- 
room was very long, and when I first spied this last man, 
he was at the other end of the room bowing very low. 
He would bow, then advance a few steps, then bow 
again, then resume the forward march toward me. I 
reminded myself of some ancient king, so profound were 
his obeisances. At first I thought to myself, " He bows 
too low, he must have been up to some devilment 
lately!" Experience showed me later that it was 
simply one of the ever-present manifestations of the 
respect of the Filipino for constituted authority. They 
positively love to show their respect for authority, just 
as a good soldier loves to show his respect for an officer. 
Here some American remarks: "Ah, but that is not 
good proof of capacity for self-government. They 
would not 'cuss out' the party in power enough." I 
answer: Who made you the judge to say that our 
particular form of government and our particular way 
of doing things is better for each and every other people 
under the sun than any they can devise for themselves? 
But there was of course another possible reason for 
the profundity of the obeisances of my judicial sub- 
ordinate above mentioned. When I reached that prov- 

1 As it turned out, I lost nothing in the end, because my resignation 
of my military commission was not acted on at Washington, and I only 
ceased to be an officer of the army by operation of law at the end of the 
fiscal year, June 30, 190 1, as had been provided by the Act of Congress 
of March 2, 1899, organizing the twenty-five regiments for Philippine 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 369 

ince of Ilocos Norte in July, 1901, the people were in a 
state of submission that was simply abject. They had 
at first worked the amigo business on General Young, 
and treachery of that kind had been so inexorably fol- 
lowed by dire punishment, that every home in the 
country had its lesson. Yet that was the only way. 
The poor devils did not seem to know when they were 
licked. This is not maudlin sentiment. It is a protest 
against the cotemporary libel on Filipino patriot- 
ism about "the great majority" being " entirely 
willing" to accept our rule, and the cotemporary be- 
littling of the work the army had to do to make them 
accept it. 

I remained in charge of the First Judicial District 
for more than a year, and during that period tried few 
or no crimes of a political character, that is to say, 
indictments for sedition or the like — attempts to sub- 
vert the government. The district comprised a total 
population of about a half million people, more than one- 
eighth of the population of Luzon, and a total area of 
over 13,000 square miles, nearly one-third of all Luzon. 
But remember, this was in northern Luzon, where the 
work of pacification was luckily completed by the army 
before the " peace-at-any-price " policy began. We 
will see what happened in my friend Judge Carson's 
district, and in the rest of southern Luzon later. The 
principal broad general fact I now recall, in connection 
with the administration of justice in the First Judicial 
District during the year or more I had it, is that the 
main volume of business on the court calendars was 
crimes of violence of a strictly non-political character 
due to lack of efficient police protection in the several 
communities, consequent on withdrawal of military 
garrisons. The country was in an unsettled state. 
The aftermath of war, lawless violence, was virulently 
24 



370 American Occupation of Philippines 

present, and the presence of troops scattered through 
a province, under such circumstances, is a won- 
derful moral force to restrain lawlessness. However 
high the purpose, however kindly the motive, the 
setting up of a civil government in the Philippines 
at the time it was set up, when the country was 
far from ready for it, was a terrible mistake. Of 
course no one man in a given province or judicial 
district had a bird's-eye view of the whole situation 
and the whole panorama at the time, such as we 
can get at this distance, in retrospect. Of course it 
did not lie in human nature for the men respon- 
sible for the mistake to see it at first, and, the die 
once cast, they had to keep on, with intermittent re- 
sort to military help, the extent of which help was 
always minimized thereafter. To show how little the 
general state of the archipelago was understood by 
American provincial officials busy in a given part of it, 
and getting little or no news of the outside world, I 
remained in the First Judicial District from July, 1901, 
to August, 1902, and heard nothing of the great in- 
surrection in southern Luzon, in Batangas, and the 
adjacent provinces, which raged during the winter of 
1901-02, except a vague rumor that there was trouble 
down there. The Filipinos did, however. Of course 
for Mr. Root to be able to furnish in December, 1901, a 
report, as Secretary of War, to the President, for 
consumption by Congress and the people of this coun- 
try, to the effect that his volunteer army had been 
mustered out on schedule time, June 30, 1901, and a 
11 civil" government set up and in due operation, was a 
nice showing, calculated to sooth latent public discon- 
tent with wading through slaughter to over-seas domin- 
ion. Reports thereafter of disturbances could always 
be waived aside as merely local in character, and not 



Governor Taft — 190 1-2 371 

serious. If it were stoutly asserted that everything 
was quiet all over the archipelago except in certain 
parts of certain localities, naming them, that sounded 
well, and as the public at home simply skipped the 
unpronounceable names, not caring much whether 
they represented molecules or hemispheres, all went 
well. For instance, most of the provinces of the 
archipelago were organized under " civil" government 
prior to the inauguration of Governor Taft, which 
occurred, July 4, 1901, and on Jury 17th, thereafter, 
Batangas, Cebu, and Bohol were restored to military 
control. 1 I suppose the fact that Batangas, Cebu, 
and Bohol had been so restored was duly announced 
at the time in the Associated Press despatches 
from Manila. But what light did it throw on the 
situation? Who knew whether any one of these 
names represented a mountain lair, a country village, 
a remote islet, or a large and populous province? 
As a matter of fact, each was a province, and the 
total population of the three provinces was 1, 180,655, 2 
and their total area 4651 square miles. 3 The emi- 
nent gentlemen charged with the government of the 
Islands, once they committed themselves to their 
" civil" government, persisted always in treating the 
insurrection, as General Hancock's campaign speeches 
used to treat the tariff — as "a local issue." The true 
analogy, that of a house on fire, with the fire partly but 
not wholly under control, and momentarily subject to 
gusts of wind, never seems to have occurred to them. 
Here were provinces aggregating nearly twelve hundred 

*See the Act of the U. S. Philippine Commission of July 17, 1901, 
entitled, "An act restoring the provinces of Batangas, Cebu, and Bohol, 
to the executive control of the military governor, " in Public Laws, U. S. 
Philippine Commission, Division of Insular Affairs, War Department. 

2 See American Census of the Philippines, vol. ii., p. 123. 

3 lb., vol. i., p. 58. 



S7 2 American Occupation of Philippines 

thousand people, officially admitted to be still in insur- 
rection within less than two weeks after the announce- 
ment of the inauguration of a civil government, which 
included them, with its implied assertion of a state of 
peace as to them. 

If to the three provinces above named you add 
the province of Samar, later of dark and bloody 
fame, you have a fourth province as to which not 
only had there been no "civil" government organ- 
ized on paper, but no claim yet made by any one 
that we had ever conquered it. We had been so 
busy in Luzon and elsewhere that we had not 
yet had time to bother very much with Samar. 
The area of Samar is 5276 square miles, and its 
population 266,237. (See the census tables already 
cited.) In their report dated October 15, 1901, 1 
you find the Commission admitting that "the insur- 
rection still continues in Batangas, Samar, Cebu" 
and "parts of" Laguna and Tayabas provinces. 
Now the euphemistic limitation implied in the words 
"parts of" is quite negligible, for any serious pur- 
pose, since our troops kept the insurgents rather 
constantly on the move, and the population in all 
the "parts of" any province that was still hold- 
ing out backed up the combatants morally and 
materially, with information as to our move- 
ments, supplies, etc., whenever the insurgent de- 
tachments, in the course of their peregrinations, 
happened to pass through those "parts." So, to 
make a recapitulation presenting the political situa- 
tion admitted by the Commission to exist a little over 
three months after the inauguration of civil govern- 
ment, we have the insurrection still in progress as 
follows : 

1 War Department Report, 1901 , vol. i., pt. 8, p. 7. 



Governor Taft — 190 1-2 373 

Population 

257,715 
653727 
269,223 
148,606 
153,065 
266,237 



Province 


Area (sq. m.) 


Batangas 


1,201 


Cebu 


1,939 


Bohol 


1,511 


Laguna 


629 


Tayabas 


5,993 


Samar 


5,276 



Total 16,549 1,748,573 

According to his own official statements, it thus 
appears that on October 15th, after Governor Taft set 
up his "civil" government on the Fourth of July, 
throughout one-fifth of the territory and among one- 
fourth of the population insurrection was rampant. 
The total area of the archipelago, if Mohammedan 
Mindanao be excepted (for the reason that the Moros 
never had anything to do with the Filipinos and their 
insurrection against us), is about 80,000 square miles, 
having a total population of 7,000,000. So that, to 
restate the case, one-fifth of the house was still on fire, 
and one-fourth of the inmates were trying their best to 
keep the fire from being put out. 

Just here I owe it to President Taft, under whose 
administration as governor I served as a judge, as 
well as to myself, to explain why I have so frequently 
put the word "civil" in quotations in referring to the 
civil government of the Philippines. Broadly speak- 
ing, if "civil" does not imply consent of the governed, 
it at least distinctly negatives the idea of a bleeding, 
prostrate, and deeply hostile people. And, in that the 
civil government of the Philippines founded in 1901 
did so negative the actual conditions it was a kindly 
humbug. When you go around the country sending 
people to the penitentiary by scores for political crimes, 



374 American Occupation of Philippines 

and then get criticised afterwards for "subserviency" 
to the government you are thus serving, you get a 
trifle sensitive about such criticism. Now the core of 
the charges made in this country against the Philippine 
judiciary in the early days was that they were parties 
to a humbug, pliable servants of a government which 
was trying to produce at home an incorrect impression 
of substantial absence of unwillingness on the part of the 
governed. I am very sure that the five ex-officers of 
the volunteer army above named, who went from the 
army to the bench, never did, by act or word, lend 
themselves to the idea that there was any " consent" 
on the part of the governed. Those of us who had been 
in Cuba with General Wood had but a little while 
previously- observed there a civil regime under a military 
name. We were now, in the Philippines, serving a 
military regime under a civil name. We had all of us 
doubtless — if there was an exception it is immaterial — 
served on military commissions. We therefore felt, 
without immodesty, that we could deal out to insur- 
rectos and their political cousins, the brigands, more 
even-handed justice, as a military commission of one, 
than a board of several officers, booted, spurred, and 
travel-stained from some recent man-hunt. Turning, 
however, from the more inconspicuous objects of Pro- 
fessor Willis's attacks, J the American trial judges in the 
Philippines in the pioneer days, to the now wide-looming 
historic personage who was his real objective, I was 
asked at a public meeting in Boston, rather signifi- 
cantly, by one of the most eminent lawyers in this 
country, Mr. Moorfield Storey, formerly president of 
the American Bar Association, whether or not there had 

1 See pages 102 et seq. of Our Philippine Problem by H. Parker Willis, 
Professor of Economics and Politics in Washington and Lee University. 
New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1905. 



Governor Taft — 190 1-2 375 

been attempts in the Philippines, while I was there, to 
make the judiciary subservient to the executive. My 
answer was, "No, the lawyers who have been in charge 
of the Philippine Government have never been guilty 
of any unprofessional conduct. " But the distinguished 
Boston barrister above referred to has a nephew who is 
now and has been since 1909, Governor of the Philip- 
pines — and who, before he went out there was a repre- 
sentative of Big Business in Boston — Governor Forbes, 
and I have no idea that any judge who during that time 
has rendered any decision of importance he did not like 
has been promoted to the Supreme Bench of the Islands, 
though I know that under Governor Taft, Judge 
Carson unhesitatingly declared a certain act of the 
Commission null and void as being in conflict with an 
Act of Congress, and before the time-servers had gotten 
through wondering at his rashness, Mr. Taft had him 
put on the Supreme Bench of the Philippines 1 because 
he liked that kind of a judge. 

Having sown the wind by setting up his civil govern- 
ment too soon, let us now observe the whirlwind 
Governor Taft reaped within six months thereafter. 
Of course the civil and military folk were at daggers* 
points. That goes without saying. But their differ- 
ences were decorously suppressed so that the Filipinos 
did not get hold of them. To that end, the situation 
was also diligently concealed in the United States. In 
his proclamation of July 4, 1902, you find President 
Roosevelt publicly smoothing the ruffled feathers of 
that rugged hero of many battles in two hemispheres, 
General Chaffee, and also commending Governor 
Taft, ,and telling them how harmoniously they had 
gotten along together to the credit of their common 
country. But in 1901, shortly after General Chaffee 

1 Where he still is. 



37 6 American Occupation of Philippines 

had relieved General MacArthur, you find the follow- 
ing cablegram: 

Executive Mansion, Washington, 
October 8, 1901. 
Chaffee, Manila: I am deeply chagrined, to use the 
mildest possible term, over the trouble between yourself 
and Taft. I wish you to see him personally, and spare no 
effort to secure prompt and friendly agreement in regard to 
the differences between you. Have cabled him also. It 
is most unfortunate to have any action which produces 
friction and which may have a serious effect both in the 
Philippines and here at home. I trust implicitly that you 
and Taft will come to agreement. 

Theodore Roosevelt. i 

The most important words of the above telegram are 
"and here at home." The " serious effect here at 
home" so earnestly deprecated was that the real issue 
between General Chaffee and Governor Taft might be 
ventilated by some Congressional Committee, and thus 
bring out the prematurity with which, to meet political 
exigencies, the civil government had been set up. The 
issue was that General Chaffee was recognizing the 
hostility of the people, and deprecating the withdrawal 
of the police protection of the army from districts in 
which there were many people who, though tired of 
keeping up the struggle, and willing to quit, were being 
harried by the die-in-the-last-ditch contingent. This 
would mean, ultimately, an examination, such as has 
already been made in this volume, of the evidence on 
which Governor Taft based his half-baked opinion of 
1900 that "the great majority" were "entirely willing" 
to American sovereignty. It would also show up Mr. 
Root's nonsense about "the patient and unconsenting 
millions," so shamelessly flouted in the presidential 

1 Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1297. 



Governor Taft — 190 1-2 377 

campaign of 1900, and his pious Philippics against 
delivering said millions "into the hands of the assassin, 
Aguinaldo, " x and would reveal the truth confessed by 
Secretary Root in a speech made to the cadets at West 
Point in July, 1902, after the trouble had blown over, 
in which, apropos of the valor and services of the army, 
he referred proudly to its having then just completed the 
suppression of "an insurrection of 7,000,000 people." 

On September 28, 1901, just prior to President 
Roosevelt's above cablegram pouring oil on the troubled 
politico-military insular waters, a company of General 
Chaffee's command, Company C, of the 9th Infantry, 
had been taken off their guard and massacred at a place 
called Balangiga, in the island of Samar. 2 This had 
made General Chaffee somewhat angry, and explains 
the subsequent dark and bloody drama of which Gen- 
eral "Jake" Smith was the central figure, whereby 
Samar was made "a howling wilderness." But Gov- 
ernor Taft was filled with much more solicitude about 
the success of his civil government than he was about 
the obscure lives lost at Balangiga. Apropos of the 
Balangiga affair he was wearing the patience of the 
doughty Chaffee with remarks like this: "The people 
are friendly to the civil government," and suavely 
speaking of "the evidence which accumulates on every 
hand of the desire of the people at large for peace and 
protection by the civil government. " 3 The same Taft 

1 The words quoted were used by Mr. Root in a speech delivered at 
Youngstown, Ohio, October 25, 1900. 

2 Sixty-six men and three officers were surprised at breakfast and cut 
off from their guns by several hundred bolo men who had come into 
town as unarmed natives under pretence of attending a church fiesta. 
Forty-five men and officers were killed after a desperate resistance. 
Twenty-four only were able to escape. War Department Report, 1901, 
vol. i., pt. 8, p. 8. 

3 Governor Taft's Report for 1901, War Department Report, 1901, vol. 
i., pt. 8, p. 8. 



37% American Occupation of Philippines 

report goes on to deprecate ' ' rigor in the treatment ' ' of 
the situation and the " consequent revulsion in those 
feelings of friendship toward the Americans which have 
been growing stronger each day with the spread and 
development of the civil government. " 

General "Jake" Smith was sent to Samar shortly 
after the Balangiga massacre, and did indeed make the 
place a howling wilderness, with his famous "kill-and- 
burn" orders, instructions to "kill everything over ten 
years old" and so forth, and the army was in sympathy 
generally with most of what he did, — except, of course, 
the unspeakable "10 year old" part — piously exclaim- 
ing, as fallible human nature often will in such circum- 
stances, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." Now 
the civil government could have put a stop to all this 
if it had wanted to. It had the backing of President 
Roosevelt. But it quietly accepted the benefit of such 
"fear of God" — to use the army's rather sacrilegious 
expression about that Samar campaign — as the military 
arm put into the heart of the Filipino, and went on the 
even tenor of its way, still maintaining that the Fili- 
pinos must like us because the civil government was so 
benevolent, — as if the Filipinos drew any nice distinc- 
tions between Governor Taft and General Chaffee, or 
supposed the two did not represent one and the same 
government, the government of the United States. 
There was much investigation about that awful Samar 
campaign afterward. General Smith was court- 
martialed and partly whitewashed, at least not dismissed. 
At General Smith's court-martial, there was some dis- 
pute about the alleged orders to "kill and burn," to 
"kill everything over ten years old," etc. But the 
nature of the campaign may be inferred from General 
Smith's famous circular No. 6, which, issued on Christ- 
mas eve, 1 90 1, advised his command, in effect, that he 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 - 2 3 79 

did not take much stock in the civil commission's 
confidence that the people really wanted peace; that 
he was " thoroughly convinced" that the wealthy 
people in the towns of his district were aiding the 
insurgents while pretending to be friendly and that 
he proposed to 

adopt a policy that will create in all the minds of all the 
people a burning desire for the war to cease; a desire or longing 
so intense, so personal, and so real that it will impel them to 
devote themselves in real earnest to bringing about a real 
state of peace. 1 

During all his trial troubles, General Smith "took 
what was coming to him" without a murmur, and 
General Chaffee stuck to him as far as he could with- 
out assuming the primary responsibility for the fearful 
orders above alluded to. If, when General Smith went 
to Samar, his superior officer, General Chaffee, was in 
just the direly vengeful frame of mind he, General 
Smith, afterwards displayed, and prompted him to do, 
substantially, what he afterward did, which is by no 
means unlikely, General Smith never whimpered or put 
the blame on his chief. But a fearful lesson was given 
the Filipinos, and the civil government profited by it. 
General Chaffee was never really pressed on whether 
he did or did not prompt General Smith to do what he 
did; Governor Taft was never even criticised for not 
protesting; but with a flourish of presidential trumpets, 
General Smith was finally made "the goat," by being 
summarily placed on the retired list, and that closed the 
bloody Samar episode of 1901-02. I wonder General 
Smith has not gone and wept on General Miles 's shoulder 
and like him become a member of the Anti-Imperialist 
League of Boston. Some of the best fighting men in 

1 War Department Report, 1902, vol. ix., p. 208. 



380 American Occupation of Philippines 

the army say that as a soldier in battle General Smith 
is superb. At any rate he may find spiritual consolation 
in the following passage of the Scriptures which fits and 
describes his case : 

But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, 
shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atone- 
ment with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the 
wilderness. x 

In his report for 1901 Governor Taft says that the 
four principal provinces, including Batangas, which 
gave trouble shortly after the civil government was set 
up in that year, and had to be returned to military 
control, were organized under civil rule "on the recom- 
mendation " of the then commanding general (Mac- 
Arthur) 2 : It certainly seems unlikely that the haste 
to change from military rule to civil rule came on the 
motion of the military. If the Commission ever got, 
in writing, from General MacArthur, a "recommenda- 
tion" that any provinces be placed under civil rule 
while still in insurrection, the text of the writing will 
show a mere soldiery acquiescence in the will of Mr. 
McKinley, the commander-in-chief. Parol contem- 
poraneous evidence will show that General MacArthur 
told them, substantially, that they were "riding for a 
fall." In fact, whenever an insurrection would break 
out in a province after Governor Taft's inauguration as 
governor, the whole attitude of the army in the Philip- 
pines, from the commanding general down, was "I 
told you so." They did not say this where Governor 
Taft could hear it, but it was common knowledge that 
they were much addicted to damning ' ' politics ' ' as the 
cause of all the trouble. 

1 Leviticus xvi., 10. 

2 War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 8, p. 12. 



Governor Taft — 190 1-2 381 

Governor Taft's statement in his report for 1901, that 
the four principal provinces, above named, Batangas 
and the rest, were organized under civil rule "on the 
recommendation of General MacArthur," is fully ex- 
plained in his testimony before the Senate Committee 
of 1902. From the various passages hereinbefore quoted 
from President McKinley's state papers concerning 
the Philippines, especially his messages to Congress, the 
political pressure Mr. McKinley was under from the 
beginning to make a show of "civil" government, thus 
emphasizing the alleged absence of any real substantial 
opposition to our rule by a seeming absence of necessity 
for the use of force, so as to palliate American repug- 
nance to forcing a government upon an unwilling people, 
has been made clear. There were to be no "dark days 
of reconstruction." The Civil War in the United 
States from 1861 to 1865 was a love feast compared 
with our war in the Philippines. Yet the work of 
reconstruction in the Philippines was to be predicated 
on the theory of consent, so persistently urged by 
President McKinley before the American people from 
the beginning, viz., that the insurrection represented 
only a small faction of the people. We have seen how 
General MacArthur also had originally, in 1898, enter- 
tained this notion, and how by the time he took Malolos 
in March, 1899, he had gotten over this notion, and had 
— regretfully — recognized that "the whole people are 
loyal to Aguinaldo and the cause he represents. " And 
now came Governor Taft, after fifteen months more of 1/ 
continuous fighting, to tell General MacArthur, on 
behalf of Mr. McKinley, that he, MacArthur, did not 
know what he was talking about, and that "the great 
majority " were for American rule. The representative 
men of my own State of Georgia welcomed the return 
of the State to military control in 1870. Most of them 



382 American Occupation of Philippines 

had been officers of the Confederate army. The Fed- 
eral commander simply told them that if they could not 
restrain the lawless element of their own people, he 
would. By premature setting up of the Philippine 
civil government, the lawless element was allowed full 
swing. General MacArthur had been in the Civil War. 
He knew something about reconstruction. But here 
were the Taft Commission, with instructions from Mr. 
McKinley to the effect that civil government, govern- 
ment " essentially popular in form, " was to be set up as 
fast as territory was conquered. It did n't make any 
difference about the government being "essentially 
popular" just so it was " essentially popular inform,." 
To the Senate Committee of 1902, Governor Taft said: 

General MacArthur and the Commission did differ as 
to where the power lay with respect to the organization of 
civil governments, as to who should say what civil governments 
shoidd be organized, the Commission contending that, under 
the instructions, it was left to them, and General MacArthur 
thinking that everything was subject to military control 
ultimately, in view of the fact that the islands were in a 
state of war. J 

Governor Taft then added that he and General Mac- 
Arthur reached a modus vivendi. When a good 
soldier once finds out just what his commander-in- 
chief wants done, he will endeavor, in loyal good faith, 
to carry out the spirit of instructions, no matter how 
unwise they may seem to him. As soon as General 
MacArthur saw what President McKinley wanted done, 
he proceeded to co-operate loyally with Governor Taft 
to carry out the plan. He well knew the country was 
not ready for civil government, but if Mr. McKinley 
was bent on crowding civil government forward as fast 

1 Senate Document jji, pt. I, p. 86, 57th Congress, 1st Session (1902). 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 383 

as territory was conquered, he would make his recom- 
mendations on that basis. In the matter of the utter 
folly of the prematurity with which the civil govern- 
ment was set up in the Philippines in 1901, and the 
terrible consequences to the hapless Filipinos, herein- 
after described, which followed, by reason of the pre- 
mature withdrawal of the police protection of the army 
and the sense of security its several garrisons radiated, 
from a country just recovering from some six years of 
war, General MacArthur's exemption from responsibil- 
ity is shown by his reports for 1900 and 1901. 1 The 
former has already been fully examined, and the origi- 
nal sharp differences between him and Governor Taft 
made clear. In the latter report dated July 4, 1901, the 
date of the Taft inauguration as Governor, and also, 
if I mistake not, the day of General MacArthur's final 
departure for the United States, the latter washes his 
hands of the kindly McKinley-Taft nonsense, born of 
political expediency, about there having never been any 
real fundamental or unanimous resistance, in no uncer- 
tain terms thus: 

Anything in the immediate future calculated to impede 
the activity or reduce the efficiency of these instruments 
[our military forces,] will not only be a menace to the 
present, but put in jeopardy the entire future of American 
possibilities in the archipelago. 2 

No, President Taft can never make General Mac- 
Arthur "the goat" for what General Bell had to do in 
Batangas Province in 1901-02 to make our "willing 5 ' 
subjects behave. Nor can the ultimate responsibility 
before the bar of history for the awful fact that, accord- 

1 War Department Report for iqoo, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 59 et seq. Ib-id., 
190 1, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 88 et seq. 

2 Report for 1901, p. 98. 



384 American Occupation of Philippines 

ing to the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey 
Atlas of the Philippines of 1899, the population of 
Batangas Province was 312,192, and according to the 
American Census of the Philippines of 1903 it was 
257,715, x rest entirely on military shoulders. An at- 
tempt to place the responsibility for the prematurity of 
the civil government on General MacArthur was made 
by Honorable Henry C. Ide, who was of the Taft Com- 
mission of 1900, and later Governor General of the 
Islands, and is now Minister to Spain, in the North 
American Review for December, 1907. But Mr. Taft, 
a man of nobler mould, has at least maintained a 
decorous silence on the subject except when interrogated 
by Congress, and when so interrogated, his testimony, 
above quoted, if analyzed, places the responsibility 
where it honestly belongs. In 1900 the Taft Commis- 
sion were not taking much military advice. 

Batangas province was first taken under the wing of 
the peace-at-any-price policy by the Act of the Taft 
Commission of May 2, 1901, entitled " An Act Extending 
the Provisions of ' the Provincial Government Act ' 2 to 
the Province of Batangas. " By the Act of the Com- 
mission of July 17, 1901, the provinces of Batangas, 
Cebu, and Bohol, were restored to military control. 
When the civil authorities turned those provinces back 
to military control, they well knew the frame of mind 
the military were in, and there is no escape from the 
proposition that they, in effect, said to the military: 
"Take them and chasten them; go as far as you like. 
After you are done with them, it will be time enough to 

1 See Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 123. 

2 The Provincial Government Act was an act passed February 6, 
1 90 1, outlining the general scheme of government for the several] prov- 
inces, and indicating the various tempting official positions attaching 
thereto. 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 385 

pet them again. But for the present we mean business. " 
General Bell was scathingly criticised on the floor of the 
United States Senate for what he did in Batangas in 
1901-02, but by the time he took hold there it had 
become a case of " spare the rod and spoil the child/' 
The substitution by the Commission of kindness, and a 
disposition to forget what the Filipinos could not forget, 
for firmness and the policy of making them submit 
unreservedly to the inevitable,— viz., abandonment of 
their dream of independence—had created among them 
a well-nigh ineradicable impression that, for some 
reason or other, whether due to disapproval in the 
United States of the so-called " imperial" policy or 
what not, we were afraid of them. General Bell's task 
in Batangas, therefore, was to eradicate this impression 
all over the archipelago by making an example of the 
Batangas people. 

In General Chaffee's report for 1902, * he prefaces 
his account of General Bell's operations in Batangas as 
follows: 

The long-continued resistance in the province of Batan- 
gas and in certain parts of the bordering provinces of Taya- 
bas, Laguna, and Cavite, had made it apparent to me and 
to others that the insurrectionary force keeping up the 
struggle there could exist and maintain itself only through 
the connivance and knowledge of practically all the inhabi- 
tants; that it received the active support of many who 
professed friendship for United States authority, etc. 

This last was a thrust at Governor Taft's new-found 
Filipino friends and advisers, in whose lack of sympathy 
with the cause of their country the Governor so pro- 
foundly believed, but in whose continuing co-operation 

1 War Department Report, 1902, vol. ix., p. 191. 



386 American Occupation of Philippines 

in the killing of his soldiers General Chaffee believed 
still more profoundly. 

General Bell's famous operations on a large scale in 
Batangas began January I, 1902. The great mistake 
of the Civil Commission, to which they adhered so long, 
was in supposing that when the respectable military 
element of the insurgents was pursued to capture or 
surrender, these last could and would thereafter control 
the situation. As a matter of fact, whether they could 
or not, they did not. 

In his celebrated circular order dated Batangas, 
December 9, 1901, General Bell announced: 

To all Station Commanders: 

A general conviction, which the brigade commander 
shares, appears to exist, that the insurrection in this brigade 
continues because the greater part of the people, especially 
the wealthy ones, pretend to desire, but do not in reality 
want peace; that when all really want peace, we can have it 
promptly. Under such circumstances, it is clearly indi- 
cated that a policy should be adopted that will, as soon as 
possible, make the people want peace and want it badly. 

The only acceptable and convincing evidence of the real 
sentiments of either individuals or town councils should be 
such acts publicly performed as must inevitably commit them 
irrevocably to the side of Americans by arousing the ani- 
mosity of the insurgent element. * * * No person should 
be given credit for loyalty simply because he takes the oath 
of allegiance, or secretly conveys to Americans worthless 
information and idle rumors which result in nothing. Those 
who publicly guide our troops to the camps of the enemy, 
who publicly identify insurgents, who accompany troops in 
operations against the enemy, who denounce and assist in 
arresting the secret enemies of the Government, who 
publicly obtain and bring reliable and valuable information to 
commanding officers, those in fact who publicly array them- 
selves against the insurgents, and for Americans, should be 



Governor Taft — 1901-2 387 

trusted and given credit for loyalty, but no others. No person 
should be given credit for loyalty solely on account of having 
done nothing for or against us so far as known. Neutrality 
should not be tolerated. Every inhabitant of this brigade 
should be either active friend or be classed as enemy. 

In his Circular Order No. 5, dated Batangas, Decem- 
ber 13, 1901, 1 General Bell announced that General 
Orders No. 100, Adjutant General's Office, 1863, ap- 
proved and published by order of President Lincoln, 
for the government of the armies of the United States 
in the field, would thereafter be regarded as the guide 
of his subordinates in the conduct of the war. This 
order is familiar to all who have ever made any study 
of military law. Ordinarily, of course, a captured 
enemy is entitled to "the honors of war, " i. e., he must 
be held, housed, and fed, unless exchanged, until the 
close of the war. But where an enemy places himself 
by his conduct without the pale of the laws of war, i. e., 
where he does not "play the game according to the 
rules," he may be killed on sight, like other outlaws. 

Under General Orders No. 100, 1863, men and squads 
of men w r ho, without commission, without being part 
or portion of the regularly organized hostile army, 
fight occasionally only, and with intermittent returns 
to their homes and avocations, and frequent assumption 
of the semblance of peaceful pursuits, divesting them- 
selves of the character and appearance of soldiers; 
armed prowlers seeking to cut telegraph wires, destroy 
bridges and the like, etc., are not entitled to the protec- 
tion of the laws of war and may be shot on sight. In 
other words, the game being one of life and death, you 
must take even chances with your opponent. General 
Bell's defenders on the floor of the Senate simply relied 

1 Senate Document 331, p. 16 12 et seq. 



388 American Occupation of Philippines 

on General Orders No. ioo. However, there is nothing 
about reconcentration in that order. We learned that 
from the Spaniards. In fact we never did succeed in 
bringing to terms the far Eastern colonies we bought 
from Spain, until we adopted her methods with regard 
to them. Another of the expedients adopted by Gen- 
eral Bell in Batangas seems harsh, but it was used by 
Wellington in the latter end of the Napoleonic wars, 
and by the Germans in the latter end of the Franco- 
Prussian War. It was to promise the inhabitants of a 
given territory that whenever a telegraph wire or pole 
was cut the country within a stated radius thereof, 
including all human habitations, would be devastated. 
It is in General Bell's Circular Order No. 7 of December 
15, 1901, 1 that we find the genesis of the idea of basing 
tactics used by Weyler in Cuba on Mr. Lincoln's 
General Order 100. He there says: 

Though Section 17, General Orders 100, authorizes the 
starving of unarmed hostile belligerents as well as armed 
ones, provided it leads to a speedier subjection of the enemy, 
it is considered neither justifiable nor desirable to permit 
any person to starve who has come into towns under our 
control seeking protection. 

This order goes on to direct that all food supplies 
encountered be brought to the towns. Of course this 
does not mean supplies captured from the enemy's 
forces, which may lawfully be destroyed at once. To 
those not familiar with reconcentration tactics it should 
be explained that reconcentration means this: You 
notify, by proclamation and otherwise, all persons 
within a given area, that on and after a certain day 
they must all leave their homes and come within a 
certain prescribed zone or radius of which a named 

1 Senate Document jji, 1902, p. 161 4. 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 389 

town is usually the centre, there to remain until further 
orders, and that all persons found outside that zone 
after the date named will be treated as public enemies. 
General Bell's order of December 20th, provided that 
rice found in the possession of families outside the 
protected zone should, if practicable, be moved with 
them to the town which was the centre of the zone, that 
that found apparently cached for enemy's use should be 
confiscated, and also destroyed if necessary. 

Whenever it is found absolutely impossible to transport 
it [any food supply] to a point within the protected zone, 
it will be burned or otherwise destroyed. These rules will 
apply to all food products. 

No person within the reconcentration zones was 
permitted to go outside thereof — cross the dead line — 
without a written pass. The Circular Order of Decem- 
ber 23d, apparently solicitous lest subordinate command- 
ers might become infected with the Taft belief in 
Filipino affection, directs that after January 1, 1902, 
all the municipal officials, members of the police force, 
etc., "who have not fully complied with their duty by 
actively aiding the Americans and rendering them valu- 
able service," shall be summarily thrown into prison. 1 
Circular Order No. 19, issued on Christmas Eve, 1901, 
provided that, 

in order to make the existing state of war and martial 
law so inconvenient and unprofitable to the people that they 
will earnestly desire and work for the re-establishment of 
peace and civil government, 

subordinate commanders might, under certain pre- 
scribed restrictions, put everybody they chose to work 
on the roads. 2 This was an ingenious blow at the 
1 5. D. 331, 1902, p. 1622. 3 Ibid. t p. 1623. 



39° American Occupation of Philippines 

wealthy and soft -handed, intended to superinduce sub- 
mission by humbling their pride. Note also the seeds 
of affection thus sown for the civil government under 
the reconstruction period which was to follow. In one 
of Dickens novels there occurs a law firm by the name 
of Spenlow and Jorkins. Mr. Spenlow was quite 
fond of considering himself, and of being considered by 
others, as tender-hearted. Mr. Jorkins did not mind. 
When the widow and the orphan would plead with Mr. 
Spenlow to stay the foreclosure of a mortgage, that 
benevolent soul would tell them, with a pained expres- 
sion of infinite sympathy, that he would do all he could 
for them, but that they would have to see Mr. Jorkins, 
"who is a very exacting man, " he would say. In the 
dual American politico-military regime in the Philip- 
pines of 1901-02, Governor Taft was the Mr. Spenlow, 
General Chaffee the Mr. Jorkins. But the former 
always seemed to harbor the amiable delusion that the 
Filipinos did not at all consider the firm as the movants 
in each proceeding against them, and that on the con- 
trary they were sure to make a favorable contrast in 
their hearts between the kindness of Mr. Spenlow and 
the harshness of Mr. Jorkins. He seemed blind to the 
fact that the Filipinos, in considering what was done 
by any of us, spelled us — U. S. 

General Bell's Circular Order No. 22, also a Christ- 
mas Eve product, re-iterates the usual purpose to make 
the people yearn for civil government, and the usual 
warning that none of them really and truly want the 
blessings of American domination and Benevolent As- 
similation as they truly should, and adds : 

To combat such a population, it is necessary to make the 
state of war as insupportable as possible; and there is no 
more efficacious way of accomplishing this than by keeping 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 391 

the minds of the people in such a state of anxiety and apprehen- 
sion that living under such conditions will soon become 
unbearable. Little should be said. The less said the better. 
Let acts, not words, convey intentions. z 

Under date of December 26, 1901, General Bell 

reports : 

I am now assembling in the neighborhood of 2500 men, 
who will be used in columns of fifty each. I expect to 
accompany the command. * * * I take so large a command 
for the purpose of thoroughly searching each ravine, valley, 
and mountain peak for insurgents and for food, expecting to 
destroy everything I find outside of town. All able-bodied men 
will be killed or captured. 

Such was the central idea animating the Bell Brigade 
that overran Batangas in 1902. The American soldier 
in officially sanctioned wrath is a thing so ugly and 
dangerous that it would take a Kipling to describe him. 
I have seen him in that mood, but to describe it is 
beyond me. Side by side with innumerable ambus- 
cades incident to the nature of the field service as it 
then was, in which little affairs the soldier above 
mentioned had lost many a "bunkie," there had gone 
on for some time, under the McKinley-Taft peaee-at- 
any-price policy, whose keynote was that no American 
should have a job a Filipino could fill, much appointing 
to municipal and other offices of Filipinos, many of 
whom had at once set to work to make their new offices 
useful to the cause of their country by systematic aid 
to the ambuscade business. With this and the Balan- 
giga massacre ever in mind, the men of General Bell's 
brigade began their work in Batangas in a mood which 
quite made for fidelity in performance of orders to 
"make living unbearable" for the Filipino "by acts, 

1 5. D. 331, 1902, p. 1628. 



39 2 American Occupation of Philippines 

not words." Also, the American soldier can sing, 
sometimes very badly, but often rather irrepressibly, 
until stopped by his officer. Also, whether justly or 
unjustly is beside the question, he considers a politician 
who pets the enemy in the midst of a war a hypocrite. 
So General Bell's 2500 men began that Batangas cam- 
paign on New Year's Day, 1902, giving preference, out 
of their repertoire, to a campaign song whose ominous 
chorus ran : 

"He may be a brother of William H. Taft 
But he ain't no friend of mine," 

and between songs they would say purringly to one 
another, "Remember Balangiga. " And their com- 
manding officer was the very incarnation of this feeling. 
So listen to the stride of his seven-league boots and the 
ring of his iron heel : 

I expect to first clean out the wide Looboo Peninsula. 
I shall then move command to the vicinity of Lake Taal, 
and sweep the country westward to the ocean and south of 
Cavite, returning through Lipa. I shall scour and clean up 
the Lipa mountains. Swinging northward, the country in 
the vicinity of [here follows a long list of towns] will be 
scoured, ending at [a named mountain], which will then be 
thoroughly searched and devastated. Swinging back to the 
right, the same treatment will be given all the country of 
which [two named mountains] are the main peaks. 

And so on ad libitum. General Bell's course in 
Batangas was commended in the annual report of his 
immediate superior, a very humane, as well as gallant, 
soldier, General Wheaton, as "a model in suppressing 
insurrections under like circumstances. " x The Batan- 
gas programme was approved by General Chaffee, the 

1 War Department Report, 1902, vol. ix., p. 221. 



Governor Taft — 190 1-2 393 

commanding general. In 1902 the United States Senate 
rang with indiscriminate denunciation of the Batangas 
severities and the Samar "kill and burn" orders. I 
tried in 1903, without success, to satisfy my distin- 
guished and beloved fellow- townsman, Senator Bacon, 
that at the time it was adopted it had become a military 
necessity, which it had. The fact was that the Mc- 
Kinley-Taft policy of conciliation, intended to gild 
the rivets of alien domination and cure the desire for 
independence by coddling, had loaned aid and comfort 
to the enemy, by creating, among a people used thereto- 
fore solely to force as a governmental agency for making 
sovereignty respected, the pathetic notion that we were 
afraid of them, and might be weakening in respect to 
our declared programme of denying them independence. 
The Bell opinion of the Commission's confidence in 
Filipino gladness at its advent among them is suf- 
ficiently apparent in his orders to his troops. On 
May 23, 1902, Senator Bacon read in the Senate a 
letter from an officer of the army, a West Point grad- 
uate and a personal friend of the Senator's, whose 
name he withheld, but for whose veracity he vouched, 
which letter alluded to "a reconcentrado, pen with 
a dead line outside, beyond which everything living 
is shot"; spoke of "this corpse-carcass stench wafted 
in" (to where the letter- writer sat writing) as making 
it "slightly unpleasant here," and made your flesh 
crawl thus: 

At nightfall clouds of vampire bats softly swirl out on 
their orgies over the dead. 

This does not sound to me like Batangas and Bell. 
It sounds like Smith and Samar. There were about 
100,000 people, all told, gathered in the reconcentrado 



394 American Occupation of Philippines 

camps in Batangas under General Bell, x and they were 
handled as efficiently as General Funston handled 
matters after the San Francisco fire. There was no 
starvation in those camps. All the reconcentrados had 
to do was not to cross the dead line of the reconcentra- 
tion zone, and to draw their rations, which were pro- 
vided as religiously as any ordinary American who is 
not a fiend and has plenty of rice on hand for the 
purpose will give it to the hungry. The reconcentrado 
camps and the people in them were daily looked after 
by medical officers of the American army. General 
Bell's active campaigning began in Batangas January 
I, 1902, Malvar surrendered April 16 thereafter, and 
Batangas was thoroughly purged of insurrectos and 
the like by July. During this period the total of insur- 
gent killed was only 163, and wounded 209; and 3626 
insurgents surrendered. 2 

The truth is General Bell's "bark" was much worse 
than his "bite." The inestimable value of what he 
did in Batangas in 1901-02 lay in convincing the 
Filipinos once and for all that we were not as impotent 
as the civil-government coddling had led them quite 
naturally, but very foolishly, to think we were. Refer- 
ence was made above to the fact that the population 
of Batangas in 1899 was 312,192, and in 1903, 257,715. 
Those figures were inserted at the outset to make 
General Bell's "bark" sound louder, but now that we 
are considering his "bite" — how many lives his Batan- 
gas lesson to the Filipino people cost — another bit of 
testimony is tremendously relevant. On December 18, 
1901, the Provincial Secretary of Batangas Province 
reported to Governor Taft that the mortality in Batan- 

1 Colonel Wagner's testimony before Senate Committee of 1902. 
Senate Document jji, pt. 3, p. 2873. 

2 War Department Report, 1902, vol. ix., p. 284. 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 395 

gas due to war, pestilence, and famine "has reduced to 
a little over 200,000 the more than 300,000 inhabitants 
which in former years the province had. ' ' x Considering 
that General Bell's i90i-'02 campaign in that ill-fated 
province cost outright but 163 killed, — how many of 
the 209 wounded recovered does not appear; they may 
have all recovered — the Bell programme in Batangas was 
indeed a very tender model, from the humanitarian 
stand-point, of civilizing with a Krag, a model of "sup- 
pressing insurrection under like circumstances." But 
it was never again followed. It had made too much 
noise at home. Senator Bacon's ' ' corpse-carcass stench ' ' 
from supposed reconcentrado pens and his "clouds of 
vampire bats softly swirling on their orgies over the 
dead," so vividly reminded our people of why they had 
driven Spain out of Cuba, that the Administration 
became apprehensive. Until the noise about the Batan- 
gas business, our people had been led by Governor Taft 
and President Roosevelt to believe that the Filipinos 
were most sobbingly in love with "a benign civil govern- 
ment" and had forgotten all about independence. It 
was obvious that a repetition of such a campaign in any 
other province might create in the public mind at home 
a disgust with the whole Philippine policy which would 
be heard at the polls in the next presidential election. 
So the Batangas affair made it certain that the army 
was not going to be ordered out again in the Philippines 
before said next presidential election, at least ; whatever 
castigation might be deemed advisable thereafter. 

It was intimated above that Senator Bacon's army 
friend's "clouds of vampire bats softly swirling" over 
the corpses of reconcentrados, were doing said swirling 
not over Batangas at all, but over Samar. Any man 
familiar with the lay of the land in the two provinces 

1 Senate Document 331, 1902, p. 887. 



396 American Occupation of Philippines 

can see from the letter that it was written from Samar. 
Moreover, Colonel Wagner afterwards testified before 
the Senate Committee of 1902 x that if there had been 
any great mortality in the reconcentration camps in 
Batangas, he would have known of it. He inspected 
practically all those Batangas camps. Nobody who 
was in the islands at the time doubts but what such 
conditions may have obtained in some places under 
General Smith in Samar, or believes for a moment that 
any such conditions would have been tolerated under 
General Bell. General Bell has that aversion to either 
causing or witnessing needless suffering, which you 
almost invariably find in men who are both constitu- 
tionally brave and temperamentally generous and 
considerate of others. But the moral sought to be 
pointed here is not that the Bell reconcentration in 
Batangas was as merciful as the Smith performances in 
Samar were hellish, but that, in all matters concerning 
the Philippines, the army, as in the case of Senator 
Bacon's friend, is gagged by operation of law, and its 
enforced silence is peculiarly an asset in the hands of the 
party in power seeking to continue in power, in a dis- 
tant colonial enterprise. Senator Bacon withheld his 
friend's name, because for an army officer to tell the 
truth about the Philippines would be likely to get him 
into trouble with the President of the United States. 
The President, be it remembered, is also the leader of 
the political party to which he belongs. That is why 
the country has never been able to get any light from 
those who know the most about the Philippines and the 
wisdom or unwisdom of keeping them, viz., the army. 
In 1898 this republic was beguiled into abandonment 
of the faiths of the founders and started after a gold 
brick, thinking it was a Klondyke. Then and ever since, 

1 Senate Document 331, pt. 3, p. 2878. 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 397 

the most important and material witnesses concerning 
the wisdom or unwisdom of keeping the brick, viz., the 
army, — which best of all knows the rank folly of it — 
have been gagged by operation of law. All republics 
that have heretofore become monarchies, have become 
so through manipulation of the army by men in power 
seeking to continue in power. We should either resign 
our expensive kingship over the Philippines or get a 
king for the whole business, and be done with it. We 
have some ready-made coronet initials in T. R. * 

"On June 23, 1902," says General Chaffee, in his 
report for that year, 2 "by Act No. 421 of the Philippine 
Commission, so much of Act No. 173, of July 17, 1901, 
as transferred the province of Batangas to military 
control was revoked. Civil government was re-estab- 
lished in the province at 12 o'clock noon, July 4, 1902." 
The rest of the 1,748,573 people herein above mentioned 
as constituting the population of Batangas, Cebu, 
Bohol, Laguna, Tayabas, and Samar, were also in turn 
made to "want peace and want it badly, " and on July 
4, 1902, President Roosevelt issued his proclamation 
declaring that a state of general and complete peace 
existed. This is the famous proclamation in which he 
congratulated General Chaffee and the officers and men 
of his command on "a total of more than 2000 combats » 
great and small, " most of them subsequent to the Taft 
roseate cablegrams of 1900, and the still more roseate 
reports of 190 1 from the same source. The proclamation 
appeared in the Philippines as General Orders No. 66, 
Adjutant General's Office, Washington, dated July 4, 
1902. 3 It directed, in the body of it, that it be "read 
aloud at parade in every military post." It thanked 

1 Theodore Rex. 

2 War Department Report, 1902, vol. ix., p. 192. 

* Correspondence relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., pp. 1352-3. 



398 American Occupation of Philippines 

the officers and enlisted men of the army in the Philip- 
pines, in the name of the President of the United States, 
for the courage and fortitude, the indomitable spirit 
and loyal devotion with which they had been fighting 
up to that time, alluded to the impliedly lamb-like or 
turn-the-other-cheek way in which they had been be- 
having (no special reference is made either to Batan- 
gas, Samar, or the water-cure), and closes with a bully 
Rooseveltian war-whoop about the "more than 2000 
combats, great and small," above mentioned. It also 
referred to how, "with admirable good temper and loyalty 
to American ideals its (the army's) commanding gen- 
erals have joined with the civilian agents of the govern- 
ment" in the work of superinducing allegiance to 
American sovereignty. This document is one of the 
most remarkable state papers of that most remarkable 
of men, ex-President Roosevelt, in its evidences of 
ability to mould powerful discordant elements to his 
will. It put everybody in a good humor. And yet, 
read at every military post, it served notice on the 
military that if they knew which side their bread was 
buttered on, they had better forget everything they 
knew tending to show the prematurity of the setting-up 
of the civil government, sheath all tomahawks and 
scalping knives they might have whetted and waiting 
for Governor Taft's exit from office, abstain from chatty 
letters to United States Senators telling tales out of 
school, such as the one Senator Bacon had read on the 
floor of the Senate (already noticed), and dutifully 
perceive, in the future, that the war was ended, as 
officially announced in the proclamation itself. 

The report of the Philippine Commission for 1902, 
declares that the insurrection " as an organized attempt 
to subvert the authority of the United States" is over 
(p. 3). They then proceed, with evident sincerit}^, to 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 399 

describe the popularity of themselves and their policies 
with the same curious blindness you sometimes find in 
your Congressional district, in the type of man who 
thinks he could be elected to Congress "in a walk" i£ 
he should only announce his candidacy, when as a 
matter of fact, the great majority of the people of his 
district are, for some notorious reason connected with 
his past history among them, — say his war record — very 
much prejudiced against him. They repeat one of their 
favorite sentiments about the whole country — always 
except "as hereinafter excepted" — being now engaged 
in enjoying civil government. But they casually ad- 
mit also that "much remains to be done" in suppress- 
ing lawlessness and disturbances, so as to perfect and 
accentuate said "enjoyment." 

Let us see just what the state of the country was in 
this regard according to their own showing. They 
say: 

The six years of war to which these islands have been 
subjected have naturally created a class of restless men 
utterly lacking in habits of industry, taught to live and prey 
upon the country for their support by the confiscation of 
food supplies as a war measure, and regarding the duties of a 
laborer as dull and impossible for one who has tasted the 
excitement of a guerrilla life. Even to the man anxious to 
return to agricultural pursuits, the conditions existing 
present no temptation. By the war and by the rinderpest, 
chiefly the latter, the carabaos, or water-buffaloes, have been 
reduced to ten per cent, of their former number. 

Think of the condition of a country, any country, but 
especially one whose wealth is almost wholly agricul- 
tural, which has just had nine tenths of its plow animals 
absolutely swept off the face of the earth by war and 
its immediate consequences. The report proceeds : 



400 American Occupation of Philippines 

The chief food of the common people of these islands 
is rice, and the carabao is the indispensable instrument of 
the people in the cultivation of rice, 



adding also that the carabao is the chief means of 
transportation of the tobacco, hemp, and other crops 
to market, and that the few remaining carabaos, the 
ordinary price of which in normal Spanish times had 
been $10 was now $100. Then, after completing a 
faithful picture of supremely thorough desolation such 
as the Islands had never seen since they first rose out of 
the sea, certainly not during the sleepy, easy-going 
Spanish rule, they say: "The Filipino people of the 
better class have received the passage of the Philippine 
Act with great satisfaction" — meaning the Act of Con- 
gress of July I, 1902, the Philippine Government Act. 
Gott im Himmell What did the people care about paper 
constitutions concerning benevolent assimilation? What 
they were interested in was food and safety, not politics ; 
food, raiment, shelter, and efficient police protection 
from the brigandage which immediately follows in the 
wake of all war, not details as to what we were going to 
do with the bleeding and prostrate body politic. But 
the Commission had started out to govern the Filipino 
people on a definite theory, — apparently on the idea 
that if Americans wore white duck and no brass buttons, 
in lieu of khaki and brass buttons, the Filipinos would 
at once forget the war and be happy with an exceeding 
great happiness. Now the real situation was this. The 
Islands had not yet been thoroughly beaten into sub- 
mission. Northern Luzon had been conquered. The 
lake region of Southern Luzon had been conquered. 
The most important of the Visayan Islands had been 
conquered. But the extreme southern portion of Luzon, 
the enormously rich hemp peninsula already described 



Governor Taft — 1 90 1 -2 401 

in a former chapter, and the adjoining hemp island of 
Samar, were still seething with sedition which later 
broke out. All through the winter of 1900-01 Gen- 
eral MacArthur had tried to get Mr. Root to let him 
close the hemp ports. But some powerful influence at 
Washington had prevented the grant of this permission. 
On January 9, 1901, General MacArthur had wired 
Mr. Root: 

Hemp in southern Luzon in same relation to present 
struggle as cotton during rebellion. 1 

Nothing doing. General MacArthur must worry 
along with the "blockade-runners" as best he could, no 
matter how much hemp money might be poured into 
the insurgent coffers. So that in the latter part of 
1902, although the more respectable of the insurgent 
leaders had then surrendered, even in the hemp coun- 
try, the flames of public disorder, which had flickered 
for a spell after the Batangas lesson, broke out anew in 
the province of Albay, and in parts of Sorsogon, the 
two provinces of the hemp peninsula having the best 
sea-ports. The man at the head of this Albay insur- 
rection was a sorry scamp of some shrewdness by the 
name of Simeon Ola, with whom I afterwards had an 
interesting and in some respects most amusing acquain- 
tance. But that is another story. I have simply 
brought the whole archipelago abreast of the close of 
1902, relatively to public order. In this way only may 
the insurrections in Albay and elsewhere in 1902-03, 
described in the chapter which follows, be understood 
in their relation to a comprehensive view of the Ameri- 
can occupation from the beginning, and not be regarded 
as " a local issue" like General Hancock's tariff, having 

1 Military Correspondence Relating to War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 
1244. 

26 



402 American Occupation of Philippines 

no general political significance. In this way only may 
those insurrections be understood in their true relation 
to the history of public order in the Islands. The Com- 
mission always represented all disturbances after 1902 
as matters of mere banditti, such as have been chronic 
for generations in Calabria or the Transcaucasus, 
wholly distinct from, instead of being an inevitable 
political sequel of, the years of continuous warfare 
which had preceded. Their benevolent obsession was 
that the desire of the Philippine people for independ- 
ence was wholly and happily eradicated. 



CHAPTER XVI 
Governor Taft, 1903 

Me miserable! Which way shall I fly? 

Paradise Lost. 

THROUGHOUT the last year of Governor Taft's 
administration in the Philippines, 1903, both he, 
and the peaceably inclined Filipinos in the disturbed 
districts, were between the devil and the deep sea. 
The military handling of the Batangas and Samar 
disorders of 190 1-2 had precipitated in the United 
States Senate a storm of criticism, at the hands of 
Senator Bacon and others, which had reminded a 
public, already satiated with slaughtering a weaker 
Christian people they had never seen in the interest of 
supposed trade expansion, of "the days when Cicero 
pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, 
before a senate which still retained some show of 
freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of 
Africa. " x He did not want to order out the military 
again if he could help it, and this relegated him to his 
native municipal police and constabulary, experimental 
outfits of doubtful loyalty, 2 and, at best, wholly inade- 

1 Macaulay's Trial of Hastings. 

2 Says Gen. Henry T. Allen, commanding the Philippines constabu- 
lary, in his report for 1903 (Report U. S. Philippine Commission, 1903, 
pt. 3, p. 49), "For some time to come the number of troops (meaning 
American) to be kept here should be a direct function of the number of 
guns put into the hands of natives." He adds, "It is unwise to ignore 
the great moral effect of a strong armed force above suspicion. " 

403 



404 American Occupation of Philippines 

quate, as it afterwards turned out, x for the maintenance 
of public order and for affording to the peaceably 
inclined people that sort of security for life and prop- 
erty, and that protection against semi-political as well 
as unmitigated brigandage, which would comport with 
the dignity of this nation. The better class of Filipinos, 
though not so enamored of American rule as Governor 
Taft fondly believed, had by 1903 about resigned them- 
selves to the inevitable, and would have liked to see 
brigandage masquerading under the name of patriotism 
stopped by that sort of adequate police protection 
which was so obviously necessary in the disturbed and 
unsettled conditions naturally consequent upon many 
years of war, and which they of course realized could 
only be afforded by the strong arm of the American 
army. But they knew that if the army were ordered 
out, the burden of proof as to their own loyalty would 
at once be shifted to them, by the strenuous agents of 
that strenuous institution. The result was a sort of 
reign of terror for nearly a year, in 1902-3, in the 
richest province of the whole archipelago, the hemp- 
producing province of Albay, at the southern end of 
Luzon, and also in portions of the province of Misamis. 
These conditions had begun in those provinces in 1902, 
and, not being promptly checked, because the army 
was held in leash and the constabulary were crude and 
inadequate, by 1903 brigandage therein was thriving 
like a garden of weeds. Super-solicitude concerning 
the possible effect of adequately vigorous governmental 
action in the Philippines on the fortunes of the Ad- 
ministration in charge of the Federal Government at 

1 The constabulary force was about 5000. When disturbances in 
one province would become formidable, constabulary from provinces 
would be hurried thither, thus denuding the latter provinces of proper 
police protection. 



Governor Taft, 1903 405 

Washington, an attitude not surprising in the colonial 
agents of that Administration, but which, as we have 
seen, had been from the beginning, as it must ever be, 
the curse of our colonial system, had rendered American 
sovereignty in the disturbed districts as humiliatingly 
impotent as senile decadence ever rendered Spain. 

The average American citizen will admit that the 
average American statesman, even if he be not far- 
sighted, looks at least a year ahead, in matters where 
both his personal fortunes and those of the political 
party to which he belongs are intimately related to what 
he may be doing at the time. If in 1903 Governor 
Taft's administration of affairs in the Philippines was 
wholly uninfluenced by any possible effect it might have 
on President Roosevelt's chances for becoming an elected 
President in 1904, then he was a false friend and a very 
poor party man as well. Assuming that he was neither, 
let us examine his course regarding the disturbances 
of public order in the Philippines in that year, as related 
to the first and most sacred duty of every government, 
adequate protection for life and property. 

In President McKinley's original instructions of 
April 7, 1900, to the Taft Commission, after quoting 
the final paragraph of the articles of capitulation of 
the city of Manila: 

This city, its inhabitants * * * and its private property 
of all descriptions * * * are hereby placed under the 
special safeguard of the faith and honor of the American 

army; 

the President had added : 

As high and sacred an obligation rests upon the Govern- 
ment of the United States to give protection for property 
and life * * * to all the people of the Philippine Islands. 



406 American Occupation of Philippines 

* * * / charge this Commission to labor for the full perform- 
ance of this obligation, which concerns the honor and con- 
science of their country. 

We will probably never again have a better man at 
the head of the Philippine Government than William 
H. Taft. We have no higher type of citizen in the 
republic to-day than the man now 1 at the head of it. 
In the Outlook of September 21, 1901, there appeared 
an article on the Philippines written in the summer 
previous by Vice-President Roosevelt, entitled "The 
First Civil Governor, ' ' which began as follows : 

A year ago a man of wide acquaintance both with 
American public life and American public men 2 remarked 
that the first Governor of the Philippines ought to combine 
the qualities which would make a first-class President of 
the United States with the qualities which would make 
a first-class Chief Justice of the United States, and that the 
only man he knew who possessed all these qualities was 
Judge William H. Taft, of Ohio. The statement was 
entirely correct. 

The writer subscribed then, and still subscribes, to 
the foregoing estimate of Mr. Taft, whether Colonel 
Roosevelt still does or not. Though I dissent most 
vigorously from more than one of President Taft's 
policies, and though this book is one long dissent from 
his chief pet policy, still it is to me an especial pleasure 
to do him honor where I may, not merely because he 
has greatly honored me in the past, but because my 
judgment approves the above estimate. Though as 
a party leader he is a very poor general, as Chief 
Magistrate of the nation he has certainly deserved and 
commanded the cordial esteem of the whole country, 

1 1912. 

1 The reference is supposed to be to Mr. McKinley. 



Governor Taft, 1903 407 

and the respectful regard of all mankind. With this 
admission freely made, if after reading what follows in 
this and the next chapter, and weighing the same in the 
light of all that has preceded, the reader does not decide 
that the writer, far from being animated by any in- 
telligent high purpose, is merely a foolish person of 
the sounding-brass-and-tinkling-cymbal variety full of 
sound and fury signifying nothing, then he can reach 
but one other conclusion, viz., that colonization by a re- 
public like ours, such as that we blundered into by pur- 
chasing the Philippines, is a case of a house divided 
against itself, a case of the soul of a nation at war with 
the better angels of its nature, a case where considera- 
tions of what may be demanded by home considerations 
of political expediency will always operate to the detri- 
ment of the Filipino people, and be the controlling factor 
in our government of them. And if I show that in the 
Philippines in 1903 Governor Taft failed properly to 
protect the lives and property of peaceably inclined 
people, as so sacredly enjoined in the language above 
quoted from President McKinley's original instructions 
to him, lest "the full performance of this obligation" 
might prejudice the presidential prospects of his friend, 
Mr. Roosevelt, and the success of the party to which 
they belonged, then I will have shown that for this 
republic to be in the colonizing business is an absolutely 
evil thing, and that any man who proposes any honor- 
able wa}^ out of the conceded blunder of 1898, is entitled 
to a hearing at the hands of the American people, 
because it " concerns the honor and conscience of their 
country. " 

Having tried most of the cases which arose out of the 
public disorders in the Philippines in 1903, and knowing 
from what I thus learned, together with what I sub- 
sequently learned which Mr. Taft knew then, that the 



4o8 American Occupation of Philippines 

most serious of those disorders were very inadequately 
handled by native police, and constabulary, with much 
wholly unnecessary incidental sacrifice of life, in order 
to preserve the appearance of "civil" government and 
convey the impression of the state of peace the name 
implied, at a time when a reign of terror due to brigan- 
dage prevailed throughout wide and populous regions 
in whose soil lay the riches of agricultural plenty, while 
the United States Army looked on with a silent disgust 
which understood the reason, and a becoming subor- 
dination which regretfully bowed to that reason as one 
which must ever be the curse of colonization by a 
republic like ours, I know whereof I shall speak, and will 
therefore speak neither lightly nor unadvisedly, but 
soberly, charitably, and in the fear of God. 

The insurrection in the Philippines against American 
authority which began with the outbreak of February 
4, 1899, an d whose last dying embers were not finally 
stamped out until 1906, systematic denials by optimist 
officialdom to the contrary notwithstanding, had three 
distinct stages: 

(1) The original fighting in company, battalion, 
and regimental formation, with the ordinary wide- 
flung battle line; this having terminated pursuant to a 
preconcerted plan early in November, 1899. 

(2) A period of guerrilla warfare maintained by the 
educated, patriotic, fighting generals, in a gradually 
decreasing number of provinces, until the summer of 
1902. 

(3) The final long drawn-out sputterings, which 
began to get serious in the fall of 1902, in provinces 
prematurely taken under the civil government, and 
stripped of adequate military protection before things 
had been given time to settle down in them to normal. 

These last are the "gardens of weeds" — brigandage 



Governor Taft, 1903 409 

weeds — above mentioned. While the horticultural 
metaphor will help some, to realty understand the case 
nothing so fits it as the more common illustration applied 
to grave public disorders having a common cause which 
likens such matters to a conflagration. The third and 
last stage through which the Philippine insurrection 
degenerated to final extinction is adequately and accur- 
ately described in the following extract from one of the 
military reports of 1902: 

The surrender or capture of the respectable military ele- 
ment left the control of affairs and the remainder of the 
arms in the hands of a lot of persons, most of them ignorant, 
some criminal, and nearly all pertaining to a restless, irre- 
sponsible, unscrupulous class of people, whose principal 
ambition seems to be to live without work, and who have 
found it possible to so do under the guise of patriotism. r 

Such was the problem which confronted Governor 
Taft in 1903 as to public order and protection of the 
peaceably inclined people, in the two main provinces 
hereinafter dealt with. 

It is a great pity that in 1903 President Roosevelt 
could not have called in Secretary of War Root and sent 
for Senator Bacon, and those of the latter's colleagues 
whose philippics in the Senate of the year previous 
against Generals Jake Smith and J. Franklin Bell had 
reminded an aroused nation of the days of Cicero and 
Verres, Tacitus and Africa, etc., and had a frank talk 
with them somewhat after this fashion: 

Gentlemen, Governor Taft has a hard job out there in 
the Philippines. There is a big insurrection going on in 
the province of Albay, which is the very richest province 
in the whole archipelago, a province as big as the State of 

1 War Department Report, 1902, vol. ix., p. 264. 



410 American Occupation of Philippines 

Delaware, 1 having a population of about a quarter of a 
million people, and he has, for police purposes, a crude 
outfit of native constabulary, officered mostly by ex- 
enlisted men of the mustered-out American volunteer 
regiments. The personnel of the officers may be weeded 
out later and made a fine body of men, but just at present 
there are a good many rather tough citizens among them. 
Moreover, as soon as the constabulary was gotten together 
they were at once set to work chasing little remnants of the 
insurgent army all over the archipelago. So as yet they are 
as undisciplined an outfit as you can well imagine, and 
have never had any opportunity to act together in any 
considerable command. Moreover, hardly any Filipinos 
have yet had a chance to learn much about how to shoot a 
rifle. Also, they know practically nothing about the in- 
terior economy of large commands, such as handling and 
distributing rations systematically for troops and for pris- 
oners, or doing the same as to clothing, and nothing at all 
about medical care of the wounded, or the sick, or prisoners. 
So you can see that to handle this insurrection with such 
an outfit as this is sure to mean trouble of one sort or 
another. Wholly unauthorized overtures through officious 
natives, to the insurgent brigand chiefs, may, possibly, be 
made, promising them immunity, when they ought to be 
made an example of ; and that will embarrass us in punishing 
them when we do finally get them, and be an encourage- 
ment to other cut-throats to do likewise in the future. 
Worst of all, you can see that if some five hundred or a 
thousand of these brigands, or insurgents, or whatever 
they are, suddenly surrender, the ordinary police accommo- 
dations for housing and feeding prisoners will be wholly 
inadequate; yet we will have to detain them all until our 
courts can sift them and see which are the mere dumb 
driven cattle and which are the mischievous fellows. 
Therefore, in case of such a surrender, the nature of this 
constabulary force, as I have already described it to you, 

1 Delaware has 2050 square miles, Albay 1783. 



Governor Taft, 1903 411 

makes it plain that its inadequacy to meet the serious 
conditions we are now confronted with may result in our 
having on our hands a series of little Andersonville prisons 
that will smell to heaven. The majority of the people of 
the province are really sick of the war. Their best men 
have all surrendered and come in. But there is an ignorant 
creature calling himself a general, by the name of Ola, who 
seems to have a great deal of influence with the lawless 
element that do not want to work. Ola has gathered 
together nearly a thousand malcontents, who obey him 
implicitly. He is terrorizing Albay province and the 
regions adjacent thereto, and as the constabulary are not 
adequate to patrol the whole province, the people do not 
know whether self-interest demands that they should side 
with Ola or with us. Clearly, therefore, this is a case for 
vigorous measures, if we all have a common concern for 
the national honor, for the maintenance of law and order 
in a territory we are supposed to be governing, and for 
the proper protection of life and property there. General 
Bell or somebody else ought to be sent there to comb that 
province just as Bell did Batangas. But we don't want any 
howl about it. 

At this point of the supposed colloquy, — I say " col- 
loquy, " though tradition has it that most of President 
Roosevelt's " colloquys" with Senators were what 
Henry E. Davis, the Sidney Smith of Washington, 
calls " unilateral conversation" — one can imagine the 
senatorial Ciceros exchanging glances expressive of 
the unspoken thought: "The man certainly has his 
nerve with him. Does he think the Senate is an annex 
of the White House?" Then we can imagine President 
Roosevelt bending strenuously to his task with infinite 
tactf ulness thus : 

I put Jake Smith out of business, as you gentlemen all 
know, for his inhuman methods of avenging the Balangiga 



412 American Occupation of Philippines 

massacre in Samar, and I am just as much opposed to 
cruelty as any of you Senators can be. But Bell in Batangas 
is an altogether different case from Smith in Samar. All 
this about the odor of decomposing bodies wafted from 
reconcentration camps, and "clouds of vampire bats 
swirling out on their orgies over the dead," that Senator 
Bacon's army friend, whoever he may be, wrote the Senator, 
relates to Samar, and never did have any application to 
Bell's methods in Batangas. Bell did a clean job in a 
minimum of time and with a minimum sacrifice of life, 
and, while he did have those reconcentration camps in 
Batangas, he saw to it religiously that nobody starved, 
and that all those people received daily medical treatment. 

For the correctness of the picture of conditions pre- 
sented in the above hypothetical talk, I of course intend 
to be understood as vouching. If such a talk could 
have been had in 1903 by President Roosevelt with 
Senator Bacon and those of his colleagues who shared 
his views, the Albay situation might have been handled 
creditably. But the Administration was in no position 
to be frank with the Opposition. No Administration 
has ever yet during the last fourteen years been in a 
position to be frank with the Senate and the country 
concerning the situation at any given time in the 
Philippines, because at any given time there was always 
so much that it could not afford to re-open and explain. 
Mr. Root, for instance, might have been questioned too 
closely as to w r hy, when Secretary of War, he had gone 
around the country in the fall of 1900 speaking for Mr. 
McKinley, and talking about "the patient and uncon- 
senting millions" so anxious to be rid of " Aguinaldo and 
his band of assassins, " when at that very time his 
(Mr. Root's) generals in the Philippines w r ere engaged 
in activities, the magnitude of wmich may be inferred 
from a telegram sent from Washington to General 



Governor Taft, 1903 413 

Wood at Havana, asking if he could possibly spare the 
10th Infantry, and adding: 

Imperative that we have immediate use of every available 
company that we can lay our hands on for service in the 
Philippines, l 

although at West Point in 1902 he told the cadets 
how nobly the army had labored in putting down "an 
insurrection of 7,000,000 people. " No, the Adminis- 
tration in 1903 simply could not afford to be frank 
concerning the situation in the Philippines. I need not 
recapitulate here any more of the long train of reasons 
why, because they have all been fully explained in the 
preceding chapters. Of course President Roosevelt 
had no such guilty knowledge of the facts as Mr. Root. 
He was not in constant daily contact with army officers 
at the War Department, familiar with the actual 
situation in the Philippines, as Mr. Root was. He 
was simply " sticking to Taft." Somewhere along 
about the time the military folk in the Philippines were 
scoffing at the unnecessary sacrifice of life incident to 
the lack of a strong government, President Roosevelt 
had written his warm personal friend, Hon. George 
Curry, now a member of Congress from New Mexico, 
who had been a captain in his regiment before Santiago, 
was then an official of the civil government of the 
Philippines, and later Governor of New Mexico, by 
appointment of Mr. Roosevelt : "Stick to Taft, George " 
or words to that effect. Mr. Roosevelt's attitude was 
simply that of an intensely loyal friend of Mr. Taft 
who simply assumed that the Philippine Government was 
not going to tolerate impotence in the matter of pro- 
tecting life and property. But everybody at both ends 
of the line was too deep in the mire of all the long and 

1 Correspondence Relating to War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1249. 



414 American Occupation of Philippines 

systematic withholding of facts from the American 
public which had been occurring ever since 1898, and 
which it has been the aim of the preceding chapters to 
illuminate by the light since become available in the 
published official records of the Government. Hence, 
in the hypothetical conference above supposed, Presi- 
dent Roosevelt was in no position to take any high 
ground. He would have had to admit that the civil 
government of 1901 was set up too soon in order to 
stand by half-baked notions dished out in 1900 by the 
Taft Commission in aid of his own and Mr. McKinley's 
campaign for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency, 
respectively. In other words the truth about the 
Philippines from the beginning might, and probably 
would, have seriously jeopardized the Roosevelt presi- 
dential chances in 1904. So Governor Taft was left 
to his own resources in struggling with the problem of 
law and order in the Islands, intimately understanding 
the obvious bearing, just suggested, of what he might 
do out there, on the election of 1904. What then did 
Governor Taft do to meet the situation in 1903? 
Chronological order, as well as other considerations 
making for clearness, would suggest that I begin by 
telling what he did not do. 

In May, 1903, I was sent to the province of Surigao 
to try some cases arising out of what has ever since been 
known in that out-of-the-way region as "the affair of 
March 23d" (1903). In his annual report for 1903, 
pages 29 and 30, in describing the Surigao affair, Gov- 
ernor Taft correctly states that a band of outlaws came 
into the town) of Surigao on the day above named, 
killed Captain Clark, the officer in charge of the con- 
stabulary, took the constabulary's guns, while they 
were all away at their mid-day meal, scattered about 
the town, and departed. But Mr. Taft's report 



Governor Taft, 1903 415 

disposes of the whole incident in a most casual way. 
As a matter of fact the gist of it was that a heroic little 
band of Americans under Mr. Luther S. Kelly, the 
provincial treasurer, an old Indian scout of the Yel- 
lowstone country, hastily gathered the seven American 
women then in the town, one of them in a delicate 
condition, into the stone government house, and stood 
off those semi-civilized sensual brigands until reinforce- 
ments arrived. Governor Taft's failure adequately to 
present the gravity of the episode in his account of it 
does not argue well for the subsequent solicitude he 
might feel about other American women in other remote 
provinces which he was anxious to keep on his "pacified 
list, " to say nothing of politically negligible native life 
therein. x Nor does this report include any of the mate- 
rial facts showing the ineffectiveness of the rank and 
file of the constabulary to cope with the situation, or 
the general feeling of insecurity I found in the province 
as to how far the whole population might be in sym- 
pathy with the brigands. As a matter of fact, after 
that Surigao affair, Governor Taft had to turn the army 
loose in the province to go and get back and restore 
to his constabulary the seventy-five to one hundred 
stand-of-arms the brigands had so rudely and impolitely 
taken away from them, and I held court there for a 
month trying the people who were captured and brought 
in, with Colonel Meyer, of the nth Infantry, one 
of the most thorough and able soldiers of the United 
States Army, and seven hundred soldiers of his regi- 
ment acting as deputy sheriffs, and yet all the time the 
province was under "civil" government, nominally. 

1 President Roosevelt cabled Kelly, whom he had known in the West 
many years before, congratulating him on the results of his cool and 
determined fearlessness and presence of mind on that occasion, but 
elaboration on the Surigao affair was not part of the insular programme, 
which was one of irrepressible optimism as to the state of public order. 



4i 6 American Occupation of Philippines 

Colonel Meyer got the men who killed Clark, and, upon 
due and ample proof, I hung them, but Surigao was 
never taken for a day from the list of provinces enjoy- 
ing "the peace and protection of a benign civil govern- 
ment. " The writ of habeas corpus was never suspended 
for a moment. 

In the report above quoted from, Governor Taft 
remarks that if the prompt steps he did take (he had 
already described the prompt sending of the military 
to the scene) had not been taken, "the trouble might 
have spread/' But the Surigao affair seemed to teach 
the civil government nothing in the matter of subse- 
quent protection of life, nor did it lessen their persist- 
ence in relying on their constabulary for due extension 
of such protection in time of need. 

By June, 1903, another scheme was invented for 
avoiding calling on the military. When you are in a 
foreign country building a new government on the ruins 
of an old one, you naturally find out as much as you 
can about how the old one met its problems. The 
Spaniards had had the same problem in their day about 
not ordering out the military, because they did not have 
any military to order out. They were too poor to garri- 
son the various provinces. They had long followed the 
plan, from time to time, of reconcentrating in the main 
towns of disturbed districts all the country population 
they could get to come in, and then acting on the 
assumption that all who did not come in w r ere public 
enemies. This meant that when the country people 
came in, they simply looked out for themselves, while 
away from their homes, and farms, as best they could. 
Of course nobody at all looked after the farms, and 
nobody provided medical attention for the reconcen- 
trados, or sanitary attention for the reconcentration 
camps. This general plan was formally sanctioned by 



Governor Taft, 1903 417 

the Commission, in so far as the following law sanc- 
tioned it. The law was enacted, June 1, 1903. It is 
section 6, of Act 781, which was an act dealing with all 
the constabulary problems, of which this was one. It 
read: 

In provinces which are infested to such an extent with 
ladrones or outlaws that the lives and property of residents 
in the outlying barrios 1 are rendered wholly insecure by 
continued predatory raids — 

think of permitting a country to get into any such 
condition when you have an abundance of American 
troops on hand available to prevent it — 

and such outlying barrios thus furnish to the ladrones 
or outlaws their sources of food supply, and it is not possible 
with the available police forces constantly to provide protection 
to such barrios — 

there being all the time " available police forces," 
in the shape of regular troops, amply able to handle 
these unsettled conditions, which were the inevitable 
aftermath of lawlessness consequent on five or six 
years of guerrilla warfare — 

it shall be within the power of the Governor-General, 
upon resolution of the Philippine Commission, to authorize 
the provincial governor to order that the residents of such 
outlying barrios be temporarily brought — 

observe the length of time this may last is not 
limited — 

1 Every province in the Philippines is divided into so many pueblos. 
Pueblo, in Spanish, means town. But the Spanish pueblo is more 
like a township. It does not mean a continuous stretch of residences 
and other buildings, but a given municipal area. Each pueblo is like- 
wise subdivided into barrios, dotted usually with hamlets, and groups 
of houses. 



418 American Occupation of Philippines 

within stated proximity to the poblacion, or larger barrios, 
of the municipality, there to remain until the necessity for 
such order ceases to exist. 

To house and ration the reconcentrados, the following 
provision is made by the statute we are considering: 

During such temporary residence, it shall be the duty of 
the provincial board, out of provincial funds, to furnish 
such sustenance and shelter as may be needed to prevent 
suffering among the residents of the barrios thus withdrawn. 

The act also provides that during the course of the 
reconcentration, where the province does not happen 
to have the necessary ready cash, it may apply to the 
Commission, in distant Manila, for an appropriation 
to meet the emergency. What is to be done with those 
who starve during the temporary deficit, it does not 
say. If you must have reconcentration, to leave it to 
such agencies as the above, with the native police and 
constabulary as understudies, in lieu of availing your- 
self of the superb equipment of the American army, 
with all its facilities for handling great masses of people, 
as they did, for instance, after the San Francisco fire, 
is like preferring the Mulligan Guards to the Cold- 
stream Guards. Furthermore, there is no escape from 
the logic of the fact that reconcentration is essentially 
a war measure. The difference between what is lawful 
in war and what is lawful in peace is not a technical one. 
In war the innocent must often suffer with the guilty. 
In peace the theory at least is that only the guilt}^ suffer. 
Hence it is that our Constitution is so jealous that in 
time of peace no man's life, liberty, or property, shall 
be taken from him without "due process of law, " 
a provision w^hich becomes inoperative in war times, 
being superseded by martial law. I know that the 



Governor Taft, 1903 419 

early question, "Does the Constitution follow the flag? " 
was answered by the Supreme Court of the United 
States in the negative as to the Philippines. But the 
Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, under which we were 
governing the Philippines in 1903, and still govern them, 
known as the Philippine Government Act, extended to 
the Islands all the provisions of the Bill of Rights of 
our Constitution except the right of jury trial and the 
individual right to go armed — "bear arms." It speci- 
fically said in section 5 : 

No law shall be enacted in said Islands which shall 
deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without 
due process of law. 

It hardly needs argument to show that to bundle the 
rural population of a whole district out of house and 
home, and make them come to town to live indefinitely 
on such public charity as may drain through the itch- 
ing fingers of impecunious town officials, abandoning 
meantime their growing crops, and the household 
effects they cannot bring with them, is depriving 
people of their property, and restraining them of their 
liberty, without due process of law. In fact, in 1905, 
in the case of Barcelon vs. Baker, vol. v., Philippine 
Report, page 116, during an insurrection in Batangas, 
to control which, the presidential election of 1904 being 
then safely over, the writ of habeas corpus had been 
suspended and martial law declared, the Supreme Court 
of the Philippines held that detention of people as re- 
concentrados under such circumstances "for the pur- 
pose of protecting them" was not an illegal restraint 
of their liberty, because the ordinary law had been sus- 
pended. This decision held it to be both the preroga- 
tive and the duty of the Governor-General to suspend 



42o American Occupation of Philippines 

the writ of habeas corpus when the public safety so 
required. 

I refuse to believe for a moment that President Taft, 
the former wise and just judge, in whom is now vested 
by law the mighty power of filling vacancies on the 
highest court in this great country of ours, will seriously 
contend that that reconcentration law is not in direct 
violation of the above quoted section of the Act of 
Congress of July I, 1902, for the government of the 
Philippines, and therefore null and void. The truth 
is, it was a piece of careless legislation, dealing with 
conditions that were essentially war conditions, under 
a government which was forever vowing that peace 
conditions existed, and determined not to admit the 
contrary. The civil government was like Lot's wife. 
It could not look back. 

The Act of Congress of 1902 had made the usual 
provision permitting the governor to declare martial 
law in a given locality in his discretion. But the recon- 
centration law passed by the Philippine Commission 
was a way of avoiding the exercise of that authority, so 
as to keep up the appearance of peace in the provinces 
to which it might be applied, regardless of how many 
lives it might cost. In its last analysis the reconcen- 
tration law was at once an admission of a duty to order 
out the military and a declaration of intention to neglect 
that duty. I suppose the eminent gentlemen who en- 
acted it justified it on the idea of teaching the natives 
how to maintain order themselves by letting them stew 
in the dregs of their own insurrection. Yet no one can 
read the Commission's own description of the wide- 
spread lawlessness which so long ran riot after the 
guerrilla warfare degenerated into brigandage, without 
seeing, from their own showing, how obvious was their 
duty to have waited, originally, until law and order 



Governor Taft, 1903 421 

were restored, by not interfering with the war itself 
until it was over, and by keeping the country properly 
garrisoned for a decorous and sufficient period after it 
was over, until something like real peace conditions 
should exist, on which to begin the work of post- 
bellum reconstruction. After all, it all gets us back to 
the original pernicious programme outlined in President 
McKinley's annual message to Congress of December, 
1899, wherein was announced the intention to send out 
the Taft Commission, which message also announced, 
in effect, that it was Mr. McKinley's purpose to begin 
the work of reconstruction as fast as the patient and 
unconsenting millions " loyal to our rule" should be 
rescued from the clutch of the hated Tagals. 

Recurring again to the reconcentration law itself, the 
moral quality of executive action putting it in operation 
was not unlike that which would attach should the 
Governor of Massachusetts, in lieu of ordering the 
state troops to the scene of great strike riots in half a 
dozen towns around Boston, issue a proclamation some- 
thing like this: 

The situation has grown so serious that your local police 
force, as you see, is wholly inadequate to cope with the 
situation. You will all, therefore, thrust your tooth- 
brushes, night-gowns, and a change of clothing, into the 
family grip, and assemble on the Boston Common and in 
the public gardens, there to remain until the necessity for 
this order ceases to exist, and we will there take the best 
care of you we can, as was done in the case of the San 
Francisco fire. As governor I am unwilling to order out 
the military. 

If any lawyer on the Commission gave any thought 
at the time to the validity of the reconcentration law, 
in its relation to the "due process of law" clause of the 



422 American Occupation of Philippines 

Philippine Government Act, which none of them prob- 
ably did, he must simply have justified the means by 
the benevolence of the end, on the idea that he knew so 
much better than Congress possibly could, the needs 
of the local situation. But if you read this law in the 
light of a knowledge of its practical operation, there is 
more suggestion between its lines of Senator Bacon's 
friend's "corpse-carcass stench" and " clouds of vam- 
pire bats softly swirling out on their orgies over the 
dead" than there is of benevolence. It really was 
unsportsmanlike for the Commission to have entrusted 
reconcentration to the native police and constabulary 
the native governors had, and it was wholly indefensible 
for them to take the liberty of violating an act of Con- 
gress in order to live up to their pet fiction about the 
war being ' ' entirely over. ' ' 

After the term of court at Surigao in the month of 
May, 1903, I was sent to Misamis province, where I 
remained until September, handling an insurrection 
down there. This province also was nominally in a 
state of peace, i.e., there was no formal recognition of 
the existence of the insurrection by suspension of the 
writ of habeas corpus. Curiously enough, as I wrote 
Governor Taft afterwards, the Misamis crowd of dis- 
turbers of the peace were genuine insurrectos. Their 
movement was not so formidable as the Ola insurrection 
in Albay I dealt with later, but they were by no means 
unmitigated cut-throats. I have often wondered how 
they managed to be so respectable at that late date. 
They did not steal, as did most of the outlaws of 1903. 
Their avowed purpose was to subvert the existing 
government. The use of this word " insurrection" in 
connection with these various disturbances recalls a 
pertinent incident. In 1904 there was a vacancy on the 
Supreme Bench of the Islands. Some of my friends, 



Governor Taft, 1903 423 

members of the bar of my district, got up a petition to 
the then Governor-General setting forth in most partial 
terms my alleged qualifications for the place. Now in 
the Philippines, in the candor of informal social inter- 
course, all of us always called a spade a spade, i.e., 
we called an insurrection an insurrection, instead of 
referring to the disturbance in the guarded and euphe- 
mistic terms which you find in all the official reports 
intended for home consumption. So in their petition, 
these gentlemen recited, among my other supposed 
qualifications, that I had held court in three different 
provinces "during insurrections in the same." 

The Albay insurrection was the worst one I had to 
deal with during Governor Taft's administration as 
Governor of the Philippines. This was the insurrection 
headed by Simeon Ola. The first appearance of this 
man Ola in the official reports of the Philippine Govern- 
ment in connection with the Albay disturbances of 
1902-3 is in the report of the colonel commanding the 
constabulary for the district which included Albay, 
Col. H. H. Bandholtz, dated June 30, 1903. r This 
report contains a sort of diary of events for the year 
preceding the date of it. An entry for October 28, 
1902, begins: 

Early this month negotiations were opened with Simeon 
Ola, chief of the ladrones in this province, with a view of 
inducing him to surrender. 

Think of this great government negotiating with 
the leader of a band of thieves who were openly and 
flagrantly defying its authority! The entry proceeds: 

After many promises and conferences extending over a 
period of forty days, during which hostilities were sus- 
1 Report U. S. Philippine Commission, 1903, pt. 3, p. 92. 



424 American Occupation of Philippines 

pended, Ola broke off negotiations and withdrew his entire 
force and a large number of additional recruits that he had 
secured during the armistice. 

Before Ola finally surrendered he is supposed to 
have had a total command ranging at various times 
from a thousand to 1500 men. And I think Colonel 
Bandholtz must have had in the field opposed to him, 
first and last, at least an equal number of native forces. 
Ola also makes an official reappearance in the report 
of the Governor of Albay Province for 1904. x It there 
appears that reconcentration was begun in Albay as 
part of the campaign against Ola and his forces, in 
March, 1903, and continued until the end of October of 
that year. Says this report of the Governor of Albay 
concerning reconcentration : 

Naturally, the effect of this unusual volume of persons 
in a limited area was disease and suffering for want of food 
and ordinary living accommodations. 

The Governor does not say how large the " unusual 
volume of persons" was that was herded into the 
reconcentration zones, nor does he furnish any mortal- 
ity statistics. Nobody kept any. How much there was 
of the awful mortality and "clouds of vampire bats 
softly swirling out on their orgies over the dead," 
that Senator Bacon's army friend correspondent en- 
countered in Samar does not affirmatively appear. 
The number of people affected by reconcentration in 
Albay and an adjacent province that caught the con- 
tagion of unrest and had to be given similar treatment, 
was about 300,000. 2 

In his report for 1903, in describing the Ola insur- 

1 Report U. S. Philippine Commission, 1903, pt. I, p. 366. 

2 Senate Document 170, 58th Cong., 26. Sess., p. 16. 



Governor Taft, 1903 425 

rection of 1902-3, Governor Taft says: "A reign of 
terror was inaugurated throughout the province." 
He then goes on to state that to meet it he applied the 
reconcentration tactics. In the same report he de- 
scribes what is to my mind the most humiliating inci- 
dent connected with the whole history of the American 
Government in the Philippines, viz., Vice-Governor 
Wright's visit to Albay in 1903, apparently in pursuance 
of the peace-at-any-price polic}^ that the Manila Gov- 
ernment was bent on. Governor Taft says of the civil 
government's dealings with His Excellency, the Hon- 
orable Simeon Ola, the chief of the brigands, that 
General Wright and Dr. Pardo de Tavera, a Filipino 
member of the Commission, went down to Albay and 
"talked to the people," the idea apparently being that 
those poor unarmed or ill-armed creatures should go 
after the brigands. This was to avoid ordering out 
the military, and summarily putting a stop to the reign 
of terror as became the dignity of this nation. I think 
these talks had something to do with the origin of the 
charge afterwards made that immunity was promised 
Ola and the men who finally did surrender with him. 
Of course General Wright made no such promises. 
But the idea got out in the province that the word was, 
"Get the guns, " the inference being that if Ola and his 
people would come in and surrender their guns they 
would be lightly dealt with. In his book Our Philip- 
pine Problem, Professor Willis, at page 140, gives 
what purports to be an agreement signed by Colonel 
Bandholtz, dated September 22, 1903, whereby Band- 
holtz promises Ola immunity, and also promises a 
number of other things which are on their face rankly 
preposterous. Ola was much on the witness stand 
before me during that term of court, and, everything 
"came out in the wash." He was represented by 



426 American Occupation of Philippines 

competent, intelligent, and fearless Filipino counsel, 
and they did not suggest the existence of any such 
document. No proof of any offer of immunity was 
adduced before me. I think Ola simply finally decided 
to throw himself on the mercy of the government, on 
the idea that there would be more joy over the one 
sinner that repenteth than over the ninety and nine 
that are already saved. He was probably as much 
afraid that Governor Taft would order out the military 
as the wretched pacificos were that he would not. 
He immediately turned state's evidence against all 
the men under him of whose individual actings and 
doings he had any knowledge, the prosecuting attorney 
making, with my full approval, a promise to ask execu- 
tive clemency as a reward. This was in keeping with 
the practice in like cases customary in all jurisdictions 
throughout the English-speaking world. 

The magnitude of the Ola insurrection may be some- 
what appreciated from the financial loss it occasioned. 
Says Governor Taft, in his report for 1903: 

The Governor [of Albay] estimates that hemp production 
and sale have been interfered with to the extent of some 
ten to twelve millions of dollars Mexican [which is equiva- 
lent to five or six million dollars American money. ! 

As the population of the province was about 250,000, 2 
a loss of $5,000,000 meant a loss of $20 per capita for 
the six months or so of reconcentration during which 
the farms were neglected. This would be equivalent 
to a loss of $1,800,000,000, in the same length of time 
to a country having a population of 90,000,000, which 
is the total population figure for the United States 
according to the Census of 1910. 

1 Report U. S. Philippine Commission, 1903, pt. 1, p. 32. 

2 240, 326, Philippine Census, 1903, vol. ii., p. 123. 



Governor Taft, 1903 427 

It was in the latter part of October, 1903, I believe, 
that Ola finally surrendered with some five hundred or 
six hundred men. I was sent to Albay about the mid- 
dle of November, to assist the regular judge of the dis- 
trict, Hon. Adam C. Carson, now one of the justices of 
the Supreme Court of the Philippines, in disposing of 
the case arising out of the Ola performances. Con- 
ditions at the time were also very much perturbed in 
various neighboring and other provinces, and the courts 
and constabulary were kept very busy. 

An incident recurs to memory just here which illus- 
trates the state of public order. But before relating it 
a decent respect to the opinions of the reader requires 
me to state my own attitude toward that whole situa- 
tion at the time. I am perfectly clear in my own mind 
that as society stands at present, capital punishment is 
a necessary part of any sensible scheme for its protec- 
tion. I have no compunction about hanging any man 
for the lawless taking of the life of another. We owe 
it to the community as a measure of protection to your 
life and mine and all others. So far as public order was 
concerned in the country now under consideration in 
1903, the " civil " government was simply a well-meaning 
sham, a military government with a civil name to it. 
When the constabulary would get in the various 
brigands, cut-throats, etc., who might be terrorizing a 
given district, some of them masquerading as patriots, 
others not even doing that, the courts would try them. 
None of the judges cared anything about any particular 
brigand in any given case except to find out how many, 
if any, murders, rapes, arsons, etc., he had committed 
during the particular reign of terror of which he had 
been a part. Wherever specific murders were proven, 
the punishment would always be "a life for a life." 
And you have no idea how absolutely wanton some of 



428 American Occupation of Philippines 

the murders were, and how cruelly some of the young 
women, daughters of the farmers, were maltreated 
after they were carried off to the mountains. I would 
hate to try to guess how much more of this sort of thing 
would have had to occur in Albay in 1903 than did 
occur, to have moved Governor Taft to deprive Albay 
of "the protection of a benign civil government" — 
one of the pet expressions of contemporaneous official 
literature — and say the word to the army to take hold 
of the situation and give the people decent protection. 
But to come to the incident above broached. Shortly 
after I reached Albay, and set to work to hold Part II. 
of the district court, while my colleague, Judge Carson, 
held Part I. we had a call from a third judge, Judge 
Linebarger, of Chicago, who was on his way to some 
other perturbed region. I think that by that time, 
late in November, 1903, Governor Taft must have 
known he was soon to leave the Islands to become 
Secretary of War, and therefore was anxious to be able 
to make the best showing possible, in his farewell 
annual report as Governor, as to the " tranquillity ' ' 
conditions. At any rate Judge Linebarger came to see 
us, for a few hours, his ship having touched en route at 
the port near the provincial capital of Albay. Judge 
Carson had had a gallows erected near the public square 
of the town, for the execution of some brigand he had 
convicted, whether it was for maltreating some poor 
farmer's daughter until she died, or burying an Ameri- 
can alive, or what, I do not now recollect. But in 
going around the town some one suggested, as we passed 
this gallows, that we go up on it to get the view. So we 
went — the three of us. Then each looked at the other 
and all thought of the work ahead. Then Judge 
Carson smiled and dispelled the momentary sombre- 
ness by repeating with grim humor, an old Latin quota- 



Governor Taft, 1903 4 2 9 

tion he happened to remember from his college days 
at the University of Virginia: Hcec olim meminisse 
juvabit ("It will be pleasant to remember these things 
hereafter "). 

The Ola insurrection had continued from October, 
1902, to October, 1903, without suspension of civil 
government. During that period the jail had been filled 
far beyond its reasonable capacity most of the time. It 
sometimes had contained many hundreds. As to the 
sanitary conditions, in passing the jail building one 
day in company with one of the provincial officials, he 
remarked to me, nonchalantly: ''It 's equivalent to a 
death sentence to put a man in that jail." I after- 
wards found out that this was no joke. During most 
of my visit to the province 1 was too busy holding court 
and separating the sheep from the goats, to think much 
of anything else. But toward the close of the term, 
after Christmas, after Governor Taft had left the Islands 
and gone home to be Secretary of War, an incident hap- 
pened that produced a profound impression on me, 
suggested a new view-point, and started troubled doubts 
as to whether the whole Benevolent Assimilation busi- 
ness was not a mistake born of a union of avarice and 
piety in which avarice predominated — doubts which 
certain events of the following year, hereinafter related, 
converted in conviction that any decent kind of govern- 
ment of Filipinos by Filipinos would be better for all 
concerned than any government we could give them, 
hampered as we always will be by the ever-present 
necessity to argue that government against the consent 
of the governed is not altogether wrong, and that taxa- 
tion without representation may be a blessing in 
disguise. The Yule-tide incident above alluded to was 
this. Most of the docket having been disposed of, and 
there being a lull between Christmas and New Year's 



43° American Occupation of Philippines 

day which afforded time for matters more or less per- 
functory in their nature, the prosecuting attorney 
brought in rough drafts of two proposed orders for the 
court to sign. One was headed with a list of fifty- 
seven names, the other with a list of sixty-three names. 
Both orders recited that "the foregoing" persons had 
died in the jail — all but one between May 20 and Dec. 
3, 1903 (roughly six and one-half months) as will appear 
from an examination of the dates of death — and con- 
cluded by directing that the indictments be quashed. 
The writer was only holding an extraordinary term of 
court there in Albay , and was about to leave the province 
to take charge of another district to which Governor 
Taft had assigned him before leaving the Islands. The 
newly appointed regular judge of the district, Judge 
Trent, now of the Philippine Supreme Court, was 
scheduled soon to arrive. Therefore the writer did not 
sign the proposed orders but kept them as legal curios. 
A correct translation of one of them appears below, 
followed by the list of names which headed the other 
(identical) order: 

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, 
EIGHTH JUDICIAL DISTRICT 

In the Court of First Instance of Albay 

The United States against 

Cornelio Rigorosa died December 3, 1903 

Fabian Basques died September 25, 1903 

Julian Nacion died October 14, 1903 

Francisco Rigorosa died October 18, 1903 

Anacleto Solano died November 25, 1903 

Valentin Cesillano died November 6, 1903 

Felix Sasutona died September 26, 1903 

Marcelo de los Santos died June 3, 1903 

Marcelo Patingo died November 15, 1903 

Julian Raynante died September 7, 1903 



Governor Taft, 1903 431 

Dionisio Carifiaga died October 4, 1903 

Felipe Navor died September 17, 1903 

Luis Nicol died November 23, 1903 

Balbino Nicol died September 23, 1903 

Damiano Nicol died November 23, 1903 

Leoncio Salbaburo .died November 20, 1903 

Catalino Sideria died July 25, 1903 

Marcelo Ariola died October 26, 1903 

Francisco Cao died November 26, 1903 

Martin Olaguer died November 13, 1903 

Juan Neric died November 16, 1903 

Eufemio Bere died November 21, 1903 

Julian Sotero died October 30, 1902 

Juan Payadan. died September 10, 1903 

Benedicto Milla died July 30, 1903 

Placido Porlage died June 13, 1903 

Gaudencio Oguita died October 1 1 , 1903 

Alberto Cabrera died September 8, 1903 

Julian Payadan died August 4, 1903 

Eusebio Payadan died August 10, 1903 

Leonardo Rebusi died November 2, 1903 

Julian Riobaldis died October 2, 1903 

Victor Riobaldis died October 23, 1903 

Mauricio Balbin died September 27, 1903 

Tomas Rigador died July 23, 1903 

Miguel de los Santos died July 28, 1903 

Eustaquio Mapula died November 18, 1903 

Eugenio Lomibao died November 1, 1903 

Francisco Luna died August 7, 1903 

Gregorio Sierte died October 31, 1903 

Teodoro Patingo died November 21, 1903 

Teodorico Tua died September 23, 1903 

Ceferino Octia died November 10, 1903 

Graciona Pamplona died September 12, 1903 

Felipe Bonifacio died November 26, 1903 

Baitazer Bundi died October 12, 1903 

Julian Locot died October 13, 1903 

Francisco de Punta died August 20, 1903 

Pedro Madrid died August 24, 1903 

Felipe Pusiquit died July 17, 1903 

Rufo Mansalan died July 14, 1903 

Ignacio Titano died June 20, 1903 

Alfonso Locot died June 29, 1903 

Gil Locot died May 23, 1903 

Regino Bitarra died September 7, 1903 



43 2 American Occupation of Philippines 

Bonifacio Bo died August 2, 1903 

Francisco de Belen died September 29, 1903 

DECREE 



The defendants above named, charged with divers crimes, 
having died in the provincial jail by reason of various ail- 
ments, upon various dates, according to official report of 
the jailer, it is 

ordered by this court, That the cases pending against the 
said deceased persons be, and the same are hereby, quashed, 
the costs to be charged against the government. 



Judge of the Twelfth District acting in the Eighth. 
Alb ay, December 28, 1903. 

The foregoing order contains fifty-seven names. 
As already indicated, the second order was like the 
first. It contained the names of sixty-three other 
deceased prisoners, as follows, to wit : 

Anacleto Avila died September 2, 1903 

Gregorio Saquedo ^ died July 21, 1903 

Francisco Almonte died October 11, 1903 

Faustino Sallao died October 9, 1903 

Leocadio Pena died October 16, 1903 

Juan Ranuco died October 16, 1903 

Esteban de Lima died February 4, 1903 

Estanislao Jacoba died October 7, 1903 

Macario Ordiales died October 19, 1903 

Laureano Ordiales died October 27, 1903 

Reimundo Narito died October 4, 1903 

Antonio Polvorido died September 12, 1903 

Norverto Melgar died June 14, 1903 

Bartolome Rico died November 8, 1903 

Simon Ordiales died September 13, 1903 

Candido Rosari died September 29, 1903 

Saturnino Vuelvo died October 18, 1903 

Vicente Belsaida died May 26, 1903 



Governor Taft, 1903 433 

Felix Canaria died June 12, 1903 

Pedro Cuya died July 26, 1903 

Evaristo Dias died July 24, 1903 

Felix Padre died July 8, 1903 

Alberto Mantes died August 7, 1903 

Joaquin Maamot died September 5, 1903 

Santiago Cacero died May 28, 1903 

Hilario Zalazar died July 26, 1903 

Tomas Odsinada died October 1, 1903 

Julian Oco died October 4, 1903 

Julian Lontac died August 27, 1903 

Ambrosio Rabosa died September 19, 1903 

Mariano Garcia died September 12, 1903 

Ramon Madrigalejo died August 19, 1903 

Albino Oyardo died October 1, 1903 

Felipe Rotarla died September 29, 1903 

Urbano Saralde died October 5, 1903 

Gil Mediavillo died June 13, 1903 

Egidio Mediavillo died June 16, 1903 

Mauricio Losano died October 5, 1903 

Bernabe Carenan died September 27, 1903 

Pedro Sagaysay died September 29, 1903 

Laureano Ibo died August 5, 1903 

Vicente Sanosing died July 17, 1903 

Francisco Morante died June 10, 1903 

Anatollo Sadullo died September 16, 1903 

Lucio Rebeza died August 27, 1903 

Eugenio Sanbuena died August 13, 1903 

Nicolas Oberos died August 26, 1903 

Eusebio Rambillo died September 13, 1903 

Tomas Rempillo died August 19, 1903 

Daniel Patasin died August 19, 1903 

Ignacio Bundi died September 7, 1903 

Juan Locot died May 23, 1903 

Zacarias David Padilla died August 7, 1903 

Juan Almazar died September 12, 1903 

Rufino Quipi died June 13, 1903 

Antonio Brio died June 13, 1903 

Timoteo Enciso died September 12, 1903 

Hilario Palaad died August 28, 1903 

Ventura Prades died May 24, 1903 

Alejandro Alevanto died May 22, 1903 

Rufino Pelicia died May 20, 1903 

Alejo Bruqueza died July 19, 1903 

Prudencio Estrada died September 15, 1903 

28 



454 American Occupation of Philippines 

These lists were printed in an article by the author 
which appeared in the North American Review for 
January 18, 1907, which article was reprinted by Hon. 
James L. Slay den, of Texas, in the Congressional Record 
for February 12, 1907. There can be little doubt that 
President Taft saw the article, and that if it had con- 
tained any inaccuracies they would long since have 
been noticed. So that in the Albay jail in 1903 we had 
a sort of Andersonville prison, or Black Hole of Cal- 
cutta, on a small scale. 

If the military authorities had had charge of the 
Albay insurrection and of the prisoners in the Albay 
jail in 1903, it is safe to say that the great majority 
of those who died would have lived. But to have 
ordered out the troops would have been to abandon 
the official fiction that there was peace. 

Of Ola's five or six hundred men, Judge Carson and 
I, assisted by the chief prosecuting attorney of the 
government, Hon. James Ross, turned several hundred 
loose. Another large batch were disposed of under a 
vagrancy law, which allowed us to put them to work on 
the roads of the provinces for not exceeding two years, 
usually six to twelve months. Most of the remainder, 
a few score, we tried under the sedition law, and sent 
to Bilibid, the central penitent ary at Manila, for terms 
commensurate with their individual conduct and deeds. 
The more serious cases were sent up for longer terms 
under the brigandage law. We indulged in no more 
maudlin sentiment about those precious scamps who had 
been degrading Filipino patriotism by occasionally 
invoking its name in the course of a long season of 
preying upon their respectable fellow-countrymen than 
Aguinaldo or Juan Cailles would have indulged. I am 
quite sure that either Aguinaldo or Juan Cailles would 
have made much shorter shrift of the whole bunch 



Governor Taft, 1903 435 

than Judge Carson and I did. It was only the men shown 
to have committed crimes usually punished capitally 
in this country that we sentenced to death — a dozen or 
more, all told. Ola was the star witness for the state. 
He held back nothing that would aid the prosecuting 
attorney to convict the men who had followed him for 
a year. He was given a sentence of thirty years (by 
Judge Carson), as a sort of expression of opinion of the 
most Christian attitude possible concerning his real 
deserts, but his services as state's evidence entitled 
him to immunity, and for that very good and sufficient 
reason Judge Carson, Prosecuting Attorney Ross, and 
myself so recommended to the Governor. 

Ola could read and write after a fashion, though he 
was quite an ignorant man. But to show what his 
control must have been over the rank and file of his 
men, let one incident suffice. On the boat going up 
to Manila from Albay, after the term of court was over, 
Ola was aboard, en route for the penitentiary. But, as 
he was a prospective recipient of executive clemency, 
though the guards kept an eye on him, he was allowed 
the freedom of the ship. One night on the voyage up, 
the weather being extremely warm, I left my stateroom 
sometime after midnight, carrying blanket and pillow, 
and went back to the storm steering-gear at the stern of 
the ship, to spend the rest of the night more comfort- 
ably. Waking sometime afterward for some unassign- 
able cause, I realized that the crown of another head 
was tangent to the crown of my own, and occupying part 
of my pillow. It was Ola, the chief of the brigands. I 
raised up, shook the intruder, and said: ''Hello, Ola, 
what are you doing here?" He wakened slowly. He 
had no idea of any first-class passenger being back 
there, and had taken it for granted that I was one of the 
ship's crew, when he decided to share my pillow. As 



436 American Occupation of Philippines 

soon as he realized who I was, he sprang to his feet with 
profound and effusive apologies, and paced the deck 
until morning, perhaps thinking over the possible effect 
of the incident on my recommendation concerning 
himself. 

After I had recovered the use of all my pillow I went 
back to sleep for a spell. About dawn I was wakened 
by some of the guards chattering. But I heard Ola, 
who had apparently been keeping watch over my 
august slumbers in the meantime, say in an imperious 
tone to the guards, his keepers, "Hush, the judge is 
sleeping." They looked at the brigand chief, and 
cowed, obeyed. 

Ola was pardoned. 



CHAPTER XVII 
Governor Taft, 1903 {Continued) 

The Philippines for the Filipinos. 

Speech of Governor Taft. 

JUST before Governor Taft left the Islands in 1903, 
he made a speech which made him immensely 
popular with the Filipinos and immensely unpopular with 
the Americans. The key-note of the speech was "The 
Philippines for the Filipinos." The Filipinos inter- 
preted it to mean for them that ultimate independence 
was not so far in the dim distance of what is to happen 
after all the living are dead as to be a purely academic 
matter. And there was absolutely nothing in the 
speech to negative that idea, although he must have 
known how the great majority of the Filipinos would 
interpret the speech. On the other hand, the Ameri- 
cans in the Islands, popularity with whom was then and 
there a negligible factor, interpreted the speech, not 
inaccurately, to mean for them: "If you white men 
out here, not connected with the Government, you 
Americans, British, Germans and Spaniards, and the 
rest of you, do not like the way I am running this 
country, why, the boats have not quit running between 
here and your respective homes. " x Then he came back 

1 The speech referred to in the text was made at Manila in December, 
1903, but the same "Philippines for the Filipinos" policy had already 
been proclaimed much earlier. The Manila American of February 28, 

437 



43 8 American Occupation of Philippines 

to the United States and has ever since been urging 
American capital to go to the Philippines, all the time 
opposing any declaration by the law-making power of 
the Government which will let the American who goes 
out there know " where he is at," i.e., whether we are 
or are not going to keep the Islands permanently, and 
how to formulate his earthly plans accordingly, though 
the educated Filipinos are concurrently permitted to 
clamor against American "exploitation," American 
rule, and Americans generally, and to keep alive among 
the masses of their people what they call "the spirit 
of liberty," and what the insular government calls the 
spirit of "irreconcilableness. " Clearly, a policy which 
makes for race friction and race hatred is essentially 
soft-headed, not soft-hearted, and ought not to be 
permitted to continue. Yet it has been true for twelve 
years, as one of President Taft's admiring friends 
proudly boasted concerning him some time since: 

One man virtually holds in his keeping the American 
conscience with the regard to the Philippines. z 

This is true, and it is not as it should be. We should 
either stop the clamor, or stop the American capital 
and energy from going to the Islands. After an Ameri- 
can goes out to the Islands, invests his money there, 

1903, reprints from the Iloilo Times of February 21, 1903, an account 
of Governor Taft's celebrated Iloilo speech of February 19, 1903, 
which was received with such profound chagrin by the American busi- 
ness community in the Islands. There had been much bad blood 
between the American colony at and about Iloilo and the native Ameri- 
cano-phobes. The following is from the Iloilo paper's account of 
Governor Taft's speech: "The Governor then gave some advice to 
foreigners and Americans, remarking that if they found fault with the way 
the government was being run here, they could leave the islands; that 
the government was being run for the Filipinos. " 

1 James LeRoy in The World's Work for December, 1903. 



Governor Taft, 1903 439 

and casts his fortunes there, unless he is a renegade, 
he sticks to his own people out there. Then the 
Taft policy steps in and bullyrags him into what he 
calls ''knuckling to the Filipinos, " every time he shows 
any contumacious dissent from the Taft decision re- 
versing the verdict of all racial history — which has 
been up to date, that wheresoever white men dwell 
in any considerable numbers in the same country with 
Asiatics or Africans, the white man will rule. Yet the 
American in the Philippines, once he is beguiled into 
going there, must bow to the Taft policies. He has 
taken his family to the Islands, and all his worldly 
interests are there. Yet he is living under a despotism, 
a benevolent despotism, it is true, so long as the 
non-office -holding American does not openly oppose the 
government's policies, but one which, however benevo- 
lent, is, so far as regards any brooking of opposition 
from any one outside the government hierarchy, as 
absolute as any of the other despotic governments of 
Asia. Though the Governor of the Philippines does 
not wear as much gilt braid as some of his fellow poten- 
tates on the mainland of Asia, still, in all executive 
matters he wields a power quite as immediate and sub- 
stantial, in its operation on his subjects, as any of his 
royal colleagues. It never for a moment occurs either 
to the American Government official in the Philippines, 
or to the American citizen engaged in private business 
there who is in entire accord with the policies of the 
insular government and on terms of friendship with 
the officials, that the government under which he is 
living is any more of a despotism than the Government 
of the United States. The shoe never pinches the 
American citizen engaged in private business until he 
begins, for one reason or another, to be "at outs" 
with the insular government, and to have " opinions" 



44° American Occupation of Philippines 

which — American-like — he at once wants to express. 
If he permits himself to get thoroughly out of accord 
with the powers that be, the sooner he gets out of the 
Islands the better for him. This is the most notorious 
single fact in the present situation. There is no public 
opinion to help such a person, in any case where he 
differs with any specific act or policy of the insular 
government. The American colony is comparatively 
small, say between ten and twenty thousand all told, 
outside the army (which consists of ten or twelve 
thousand individuals living wholly apart from the rest 
of the community). The doctor who is known to have 
the patronage of high government officials is sure of 
professional success, and his wife is sure to receive the 
social recognition her husband's position in the com- 
munity naturally commands; and this permits her to 
make auspicious entrance into the game of playing at 
precedence with her next neighbor called "society," 
so dear to the hearts of many otherwise sensible and 
estimable women — to say nothing of carpet knights, 
callow youths, cads, and aging gourmands. Also if 
the doctor and his lady have adult children, their 
opportunities to marry well are multiplied by the sun- 
light from the seats of the mighty. Thus the doctor 
and his wife are a standing lesson to the man "with 
convictions" that yearn for utterance, but who is also 
blessed with a discreet helpmate, more concerned in the 
general welfare and happiness of all the family than in 
seeing her husband's name in the paper. What is 
true of the doctor is also true of the lawyer known to be 
persona grata to the government. Again, the newspaper 
man in favor with the government is sure to get his 
share of the government advertising, according to a 
very liberal construction, and that insures his being 
able to command reportorial and editorial talent such 



Governor Taft, 1903 44 l 

as will sell his paper, and the consequent circulation is 
sure to get him the advertising patronage of the mer- 
cantile community, thus placing success for him on a 
solid, comfortable basis. Also, a contrary course will, 
slowly, maybe, but surely, freeze out any rash competi- 
tor. Consequently, the American in the Philippines 
is deprived of one of his most precious home pleasures, 
viz., letting off steam, in some opposition paper, about 
the real or imagined shortcomings of the men in charge 
of the government. For the reasonable expectancy 
of life of an opposition paper in Manila is pathetically 
brief. The hapless editor on the prosperous paper, 
whatever his talents, who happens to become afflicted 
with " views" which he airs in his editorial columns, is 
soon upbraided by his friends at his club as " getting 
cranky, " and is told by the orthodox old-timers among 
them, "John, you *ve been out here too long. You 
better go home. " If he does not change his tone, the 
receipts of the advertising department of his paper 
soon fall off, and his friend, the more tactful proprietor, 
who "knows how to get along with people," is not 
long in agreeing with the rest of his friends that 
he has "been out here too long." Again the suc- 
cessful merchant has too many interests at stake in 
which he needs the cordial friendship of the govern- 
ment to be able to afford to antagonize it. And so 
on, through every walk of life, the influence of the 
government permeates every nook and corner of the 
situation. 

The average public man in the United States would 
not feel "nat'ral" unless intermittently bedewed with 
steam from the exhaust valve of the soul of some 
"outraged citizen," through the medium of the public 
press. But in the Philippines a public man occupying a 
conspicuous position with the government may be very 



44 2 American Occupation of Philippines 

generally detested and actually not know it. 1 The 
American in the Philippines, with all his home connec- 
tions severed, might as well send his family to the poor- 
house at once as to come out in a paper with an interview 
or speech, — even supposing any paper would publish it 
— which, copied by the papers back in the United 
States, would embarrass the National Administration's 
Philippine policy in any way. The same applies to 
talking too freely for the newspapers when home on 
a visit. 

I think the foregoing makes sufficiently obvious 
the inherent impossibility of the American people ever 
knowing anything about current governmental mistakes 
in the Philippines, of which there must be some, in 
time for their judgment to have anything to do with 
shaping the course of the government out there for 
which they are responsible. And therefore it shows the 
inherent unfitness of their governmental machinery to 
govern the Filipinos so long as they do not change the 
home form of government to meet the needs of the 
colonial situation, by providing a method of invoking 
the public judgment on a single issue, as in the case of 
monarchical ministries, instead of lumping issues as 
we now do. It is certainly a shame that the fate and 
future of the Philippines are to-day dependent upon 
issues as wholly foreign to anything Philippine as is the 
price of cheese in Kamchatka or the price of wool in the 
United States. Whether the Filipinos are fit for self- 
government or not, under our present form of govern- 
ment we are certainly wholly unfit to govern them. 
In our government of the Filipinos, the nature of the 
case eliminates our most valuable governmental asset, 
to wit, that saving grace of public opinion which stops 

1 A familiar instance of this will occur to any one acquainted with the 
situation in the Islands for any considerable part of the last ten years. 



Governor Taft, 1903 443 

public men, none of whom are infallible, before they can 
accomplish irreparable mischief, through uncorrected 
faith in plans of questionable wisdom and righteousness 
to which their minds are made up. 

To show how absolute was the executive and legis- 
lative power over 8,000,000 of people entrusted by 
the sole authority of President McKinley to Governor 
Taft — without consulting Congress, though afterwards 
the authority so conferred was ratified by Congress and 
descended from Governor Taft to his successor — an 
incident related to me in the freedom of social inter- 
course, and not in the least in confidence, by my late 
beloved friend Arthur W. Fergusson, long Executive 
Secretary to Governor Taft, will suffice. In 1901 the 
Commission had passed a law providing for the con- 
stitution of the Philippine judiciary, 1 according to 
which law an American, in order to be eligible to 
appointment as a Judge of First Instance (the ordi- 
nary trial court, or nisi prius court, of Anglo-Saxon 
jurisprudence) must be more than thirty years old, and 
must have practised law in the United States for a 
period of five years before appointed. In 1903 Presi- 
dent Roosevelt wanted to make Hon. Beekman Win- 
throp (then under thirty years of age) now (19 12), 
Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a Judge of First 
Instance. Governor Taft called Fergusson in and 
said : ' ' Fergy, make me out a commission for Beekman 
Winthrop as a Judge of First Instance." Fergusson 
said: "You can't do it, Governor. It 's against the 
law. He 's not old enough." Winthrop was a grad- 
uate of the Harvard Law School. Governor Taft said 
humorously, "I can't eh? I '11 show you. Send me a 
stenographer. ' * A law was dictated 2 striking out thirty 

1 Act No. 136, U. S. Philippine Commission, passed June n, 1901. 

2 Act 1024, Philippine Commission, passed Oct. 10, 1903. 



444 American Occupation of Philippines 

years and inserting twenty-five, and adding after the 
words "must have practised law for a period of five 
years" the words "or be a graduate of a reputable law 
school." Fergusson was then called in, and told to go 
down the hall, see the other commissioners, 1 and get 
them together, which he did, and the law was passed in 
a few minutes. Then Fergusson was sent for, and the 
Governor said, handing him the new "law"; "Now 
make out that commission." Even if Fergusson 
colored the incident up a bit, in the exercise of his in- 
imitable artistic capacity to make anything interesting, 
his story was certainly substantially correct relatively 
to the absoluteness of the authority of the Governor, 
as will appear by reference to the two laws cited. 

It is only fair to say that Winthrop made a very good 
judge. There used to be current in the Philippines a 
-story that Governor Taft had said, in more or less 
humorous vein: "Gentlemen, I 'm somewhat of an 
expert on judges. What you need in a judge is" — 
counting with the index finger of one hand on the fingers 
of the other — "firstly, integrity; secondly, courage; 
thirdly, common sense; and fourthly, he must know a 
little law." Winthfop's integrity, courage, and common 
sense were beyond all question. It could hardly have 
been otherwise. He came of a long line of sturdy and 
distinguished men, the first of whom had come over in 
the Mayflower days to the Massachusetts coast. And, he 
did know a little law. But the manner of his appoint- 
ment is none the less illustrative of how much quicker, 
Governor Taft could make and publish a law than any 
of his fellow despots 2 over on the mainland of Asia, 

1 There were five members of the original Taft Commission, including 
President Taft. 

3 1 neither forget nor gainsay the generally benevolent character of 
his despotism; and having been a beneficiary of it myself I am therefore 
disposed to see much of wisdom in the way it was exercised. 



Governor Taft, 1903 445 

considering how slow-moving all their various grand 
viziers were, compared with Fergy, and his corps of 
stenographers. 

Having now given, I hope, a more or less sympathetic 
insight into what absolute rulers our governors in the 
Philippines have been, in the very nature of the case, 
from the beginning, let us observe the change of tone 
of the government, after the reign of the first ended, 
and the reign of the second began. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
Governor Wright — 1904 

The blame of those ye better 
The hate of those ye guard. 

Kipling's White Man's Burden. 

GOVERNOR TAFT left the Philippines on or about 
December 23, 1903, to become Secretary of "War 
in President Roosevelt's Cabinet, and shortly afterward 
Vice-Go vernor Luke E. Wright succeeded to the 
governorship. After the accession of Governor Wright, 
there was no more hammering it into the American 
business men having money invested in the Islands 
that the Filipino was their "little brown brother," 
for whom no sacrifice, however sublime, would be more 
than was expected. Governor Wright was quite un- 
popular with the Filipinos and immensely popular 
with the Americans and Europeans, because, soon after 
he came into power, he "let the cat out of the bag," 
by letting the Filipinos know plainly that they might 
just as well shut up talking about independence for 
the present, so far as he was advised and believed; 
in other words, that Governor Taft's "Philippines for 
the Filipinos " need not cause any specially billowy sighs 
of joy just yet, because it had no reference to any 
Filipinos now able to sigh, but only to unborn Filipinos 
who might sigh in some remote future generation; 
and that the slogan which had caused them all to want 

446 



Governor Wright — 1904 447 

to sob simultaneously for joy on the broad chest of 
Governor Taft was merely a case of an amiable un- 
willingness to tell them an unpleasant truth, viz., 
that in his opinion they were wholly unfit for self- 
government — all of which, in effect, meant that Gov- 
ernor Taft had been merely "Keeping the word of 
promise to the ear and breaking it to the hope. " 

The Wright plain talk made the Filipinos one and 
all feel: "Alackaday! Our true friend has departed. " 
But as Secretary of War Taft, after four years more of 
trying to please both sides, at home, at last frankly 
told the Filipinos when he went out to attend the 
opening of the first Philippine legislature, in 1907, 
practically just what Governor Wright had begun to 
tell them from the moment his predecessor had ex- 
changed the parting tear with them on the water-front 
at Manila in 1903, the net result of the Wright policy 
of uncompromising honesty on the present political 
situation, may easily be guessed. 

Governor Wright's method of repudiating the Taft 
straddle took for its key-note, in lieu of "The Philippines 
for the Filipinos," the slogan "An Equal Chance for 
All." What Governor Wright meant was merely that 
there would be no more browbeating of Americans to 
make them love their little brown brother as much as 
Governor Taft was supposed to love him, but that every- 
body would be treated absolutely alike and nobody 
coddled. However, the Filipinos of course knew that 
they could not compete with American wealth and 
energy, and so did the Americans in the islands. So 
what the Wright slogan, unquestionably fair as was its 
intent, inexorably meant to everybody concerned except 
the dignified, straightforward and candid propounder of 
it, was, in effect, the British "White Man's Burden" or 
Trust-for-Civilization theory, a theory whereunder the 



44 8 American Occupation of Philippines 

white man who wants some one else's land goes and takes 
it on the idea that he can put it to better use than the 
owner. Thus early did the original "jollying" Mr. 
Taft had given them become transparent to his little 
brown brother. Thus early did it become clear to the 
Filipinos that behind the mask of executive protes- 
tations that they shall some day have independence 
when fit for it, lurks a set determination industriously 
to earn for an indeterminate number of generations 
yet to come 

The blame of those ye better 
The hate of those ye guard. 

This book has been written, up to this point, in vain, 
if the preceding chapters have not made clear how 
much political expediency, looking to the welfare of a 
party in power naturally seeking to continue in power, 
necessarily dominates Philippine affairs under American 
rule. We have observed under the microscope of 
history, made available by the official documents now 
accessible, the long battle between the political expe- 
diency germ and the independence bug which began 
in General Anderson's dealings with Aguinaldo and con- 
tinued through General Merritt's and General Otis's 
regimes. We have seen General MacArthur's attempt 
at a wise surgical operation to excise the independence 
bug from the Philippine body politic — so that the 
expediency germ might die a natural death from 
having nothing to feed on. We have seen that opera- 
tion interfered with by the Taft Commission during 
the presidential campaign of 1900, because the men in 
control of the republic could not ignore considerations 
of political expediency; and we saw the consequent 
premature setting up of the civil government in 1901, 



Governor Wright — 1904 449 

with all its dire consequences in the then as yet uncon- 
quered parts of the archipelago, southern Luzon, and 
some of the Visayan Islands. We have observed the 
effective though heroic local treatment administered to 
the Philippine body politic by General Bell in Batangas 
in 1 90 1 -2, with a view of killing off the independence 
bug there. We have seen the fierce struggle between 
some of the bug's belated spawn and the expediency 
germ's now more emboldened forces in Albay in the 
off year, 1903. We are now to take our fifth year's 
course in the colonial department of politico-ento- 
mological research, the presidential year 1904. 

It was the way the Samar insurrection of 1904-5-6 
was handled which finally convinced me that the Fili- 
pinos would not kill any more of each other in a hundred 
years than we have killed, or permitted to be killed, 
of them, in the fell process of Benevolent Assimilation. 

American imperialism is not honest, like the British 
variety. American imperialism knows that Avarice 
was its father, and Piety its mother, and that it takes 
after its father more than it does after its mother. 
British imperialism frankly aims mostly to make the 
survivors of its policies happy, not the people it imme- 
diately operates on. American imperialism pretends 
to be ministering to the happiness of the living, and, 
though it realizes that it is not a success in that line, 
it resents identification with its British cousin, by sancti- 
monious reference to the alleged net good it is doing. 
Yet in its moments of frankness it says, with an air 
of infinite patience under base ingratitude, "Well, 
they will be happy in some other generation, " and that 
therefore the number of people we have had or may 
have, to kill, or permit to be killed, in the process of 
Benevolent Assimilation, is wholly negligible. This is 
simply the old, old argument that the end justifies 
29 



450 American Occupation of Philippines 

the means, the argument that has wrought more misery 
in the world than any other since time began. 

When Judge Taft, General Wright, and their col- 
leagues of the Taft Commission, came out to the 
Philippines in 1900, they came full of the McKinley 
convictions about a people whom neither they or Mr. 
McKinley had ever seen, bound hand and foot by 
political necessity to square the freeing of Cuba with 
the subjugation of the Philippines. A perfectly natural 
evolution of this attitude resulted in the position they 
at once took on arriving in the Islands, viz., that to do 
for the Filipinos what we have done for the Cubans 
would mean a bloody welter of anarchy and chaos. 
And the presidential contest of 1900 was fought and won 
largely on that issue. After 1900, for all the gentle- 
men above referred to, the proposition was always 
res adjudicata. All protests by Filipinos to the con- 
trary caused only resentment, and welded the authori- 
ties more and more hermetically to the correctness of 
the original proposition. Loyalty to the original ill- 
considered decision became impregnated, in their 
case, with a fervor not entirely unlike religious fanati- 
cism, and belief in it became a matter of principle, 
justifying all they had done, and guiding all they might 
thereafter do. So that when General Wright ''came 
to the throne" in our colonial empire, as Governor, and 
legatee of the McKinley-Taft Benevolent Assimilation 
policies, his attitude in all he did was thoroughly 
honest, and also thoroughly British. He honestly 
believed in the "bloody welter of anarchy and chaos" 
proposition, and was prepared, in any emergency that 
might arise, to follow his convictions in that regard 
whithersoever they might lead, without variableness 
or shadow of turning. Take him all in all, Governor 
Wright was about the best man occupying exalted 



Governor Wright — 1904 451 

station I ever knew personally, President Taft himself 
not excepted ; although I still adhere to Colonel Roose- 
velt's opinion of 1901 concerning Mr. Taft, quoted in 
the chapter preceding this, from the Outlook of Septem- 
ber 21, 1 90 1, notwithstanding that in the contest for 
the Republican nomination for the presidency in 19 12, 
the Colonel "recalled" that opinion. Seriously, a man 
may "combine the qualities which would make a 
first class President of the United States with the quali- 
ties which would make a first class Chief Justice of 
the United States" and still cut a sorry figure trying 
to fit a square peg into a round hole, or a scheme of 
government, the breath of whose life is public opinion, 
into the running of a remote colonial government, the 
breath of whose life is exemption from being interfered 
with by public opinion. 

After the Albay insurrection of 1903 had been cleaned 
up, I took charge of the Twelfth Judicial District, having 
been appointed thereto by Governor Taft just before he 
left the islands to become Secretary of War. In those 
trying pioneer days they always seemed to give me the 
insurrections to sift out, but it was purely fortuitous. 
Whenever you ceased to be busy, prompt arrangements 
were made for you to get busy again. Judge Ide, the 
Minister of Justice, wasted no government money. 

The Twelfth District consisted of the two island 
provinces of Samar and Leyte, two of the six Visayan 
Islands heretofore noticed as the only ones worth 
considering in a general view of the archipelago such 
as the student of world politics wants or needs. Leyte 
had a population of 388,922,' and an area of 3008 
square miles. 2 Samar's population was 266,237, and 
its area, 5276 square miles, makes it the third largest 
island of the Philippine Archipelago. So that as Judge 

1 Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 123. 2 lb., vol. i., p. 58. 



45 2 American Occupation of Philippines 

of the Twelfth District, consisting of two provinces, the 
Governor of each of which was ex-officio sheriff of the 
court for his province, I was, in a sense, a sort of shep- 
herd of a political flock of some 650,000 people, whom 
I always thought of as a whole as "my " people. 

Samar and Leyte are separated, where nearest to- 
gether, by a most picturesque winding strait bordered 
with densely wooded hills. San Juanico Strait is 
much narrower than the inland sea of Japan at its 
narrowest point, and almost as beautiful. In fact, at 
its narrowest point it seems little more than a stone's 
throw in width. It is as pretty as the prettiest part 
of the Golden Horn. Leyte had been put under the 
Civil Government in 1901, and this premature inter- 
ference with the military authorities in the midst of 
their efforts to pacify the island had had the usual 
result of postponing pacification, by filling local politi- 
cians, wholly unable to comprehend a government 
which entreated or reasoned with people to do things, 
with the notion that we were resorting to diplomacy in 
lieu of force because of fear of them. Leyte and Samar 
were strategically one for the insurgents, just as the prov- 
inces of the Lake district of Luzon, described in an earl- 
ier chapter, were, because they could flee by night from, 
one province to another in small boats without detec- 
tion, when hard pressed by the Americano. The main 
insurgent general in Samar, Lucban, had surrendered to 
General Grant in 1902, but the cheaper fellows stayed 
out much longer, preying upon those who preferred 
daily toil to cattle-stealing and throat-cutting as a 
means of livelihood, and continuing the political unrest 
intermittently in gradually diminishing degree, through 
1903. By the spring of 1904, however, there still 
remained in Samar riffraff enough, the jetsam and 
flotsam of the insurrection — professional outlaws — to 



Governor Wright — 1904 453 

get up some trouble, so that, as brigand chiefs, they 
might resume the roles of Robin Hood, Jesse James, 
et al. During the first half of that year the opportunity 
these worthies had been waiting for, while resting on 
their oars, developed. The crop of municipal officials 
resulting from the original McKinley plan of beginning 
the work of reconstruction during, instead of after, 
the war, and among the potential village Hampdens, 
instead of among the Crom wells, had resulted in some 
very rascally municipal officials who oppressed the poor, 
getting the hemp of the small farmer, when they would 
bring it to town, at their own prices — hemp being to 
Samar what cotton is to the South. From the lowland 
and upland farmers the ever- widening discontent spread 
to the hills, where dwelt a type of people constituting 
only a small fraction of the total population of the 
Islands — ''half savage and half child" — but loving their 
hills, and wholly indisposed, of their own initiative, to 
start trouble, unless manipulated. Obviously, then, 
"the public mind" of Samar — those who know Samar 
will smile with me at the phrase, but it will do, for lack 
of a better — was likely soon to be in a generally inflam- 
mable condition. By July, 1904, the Robin Hoods, 
Jesse Jameses, et al., touched the match to the material 
and a political conflagration started, apparently as 
unguided — save by the winds of impulse — and certainly 
as persistent, as a forest fire. Every native of the 
Philippine Islands, whether he be of the 7,000,000 
Christians or of the 500,000 non-Christian tribes, is 
born with a highly developed social instinct either to 
command or to obey. The latter tendency is nuite 
as common in the Philippines as the former is in the 
United States. Hence the Samar disturbances of 
1904-5-6, though made up at the outset of raids and 
depredations by various roving bands of outlaws 



454 American Occupation of Philippines 

yielding allegiance only to their immediate chief, soon 
took on a very formidable military and political aspect. x 
The roving bands would ask the peaceably inclined 
people our flag was supposed to be protecting, "Are 
you for us or for the Americans?" promptly chopping 
their heads off if they showed any lack of zeal in de- 
nouncing American municipal institutions and things 
American in general. Pursuant to Mr. McKinley's 
original scheme — concocted for a people he had never 
seen, under pressure of political necessity — to rig up in 
short order a government " essentially popular in form, " 
a lot of most pitiable municipal governments had been 
let loose on the people, a part of our series of kinder- 
garten lessons. The plan was as wise as it will be for 
the Japanese — some one please hold Captain Hobson 
while I finish the analogy — when they conquer the 
United States, to go to the Bowery and the Ghetto for 
mayors of all our cities. Thus by our pluperfect 
benevolence, we had "contrived in Samar by 1904 to 
rouse the highland folk, or hill people, whom the 
Spaniards had always let alone, against the pacific 
agricultural lowland people and the dwellers in the 
coast villages. The latter, or such of them as did not 
join the hill folk for protection, we permitted to be 
mercilessly butchered by wholesale, from August to 
November, 1904, as hereinafter more fully set forth, 
because ordering out the army to protect them might 
have been construed at home to mean disturbances 

1 Says Brigadier-General Wm. H. Carter, in his annual report for 
1905 covering the Samar outbreak of 1904-5: "Whatever may have 
been the original cause of the outbreak, it was soon lost sight of when 
success had drawn a large proportion of the people away from their 
homes and fields. Except in the largest towns it became simply a 
question of joining the pulajans or being harried by them. In the 
absence of proper protection thousands joined in the movement. " See 
War Department Report, 1905, vol. iii., p. 286. 



Governor Wright — 1904 455 

more serious and widespread than actually existed, 
and might therefore affect the presidential election 
in the United States by renewing the notion that 
the Administration had never been frank with the 
American people concerning conditions in the Philip- 
pines. 

The annual report of the Philippine Commission for 
1904 is dated November 1st, which was just a week 
before the presidential election day of that year. 
Their annual report for 1905 is dated November 1, 
1905. In their report for 1904, the Commission deal 
with the general state of public order in the same 
roseate manner which, as we have seen, had made its 
first appearance during the political exigencies of 1900 
in the language about "the great majority of the 
people" being "entirely willing" to benevolent alien 
domination in lieu of independence. When Rip Van 
Winkle was trying to quit drinking, he used to say 
after each drink: "Oh, we'll just let that pass." 
In their report for 1904, the Commission swallow the 
conditions in Samar with equal nonchalance. After 
stating that some (impliedly negligible) disturbances 
had occurred in Samar "two months since," they add 
that "the constabulary of the province took the field" 
against the bands of Pulajans, or outlaws, and that 
"as a result, they were soon broken up, and are being 
pursued and killed or captured" (p. 3). In their re- 
port dated November 1, 1905, byway of preface to an 
account of the extensive military operations inaugu- 
rated in Samar shortly after the presidential election of 
1904, which operations had not only been in progress 
for nearly a year on the date of the 1905 report, but 
continued for more than a year thereafter, the Commis- 
sion explain their 1904 nonchalance about Samar 
thus: "It was then believed that the constabulary 



456 American Occupation of Philippines 

forces had succeeded in checking the further progress 
of the outbreak" (p. 47). 

Let us examine the facts on which they based this 
statement, since it meant that they believed that a 
duly reported epidemic of massacres of peaceably 
inclined people, over whom the American flag was 
floating as a symbol of protection to life and property > 
had stood effectually checked by November 1, 1904, 
the date of their report. And first, of the massacres 
themselves, their nature and extent. 

The Samar massacres of 1904 began with what we 
all called down there "the outbreak of July 10th." 
In August, 1904, I went to Samar to handle the cases 
arising out of the disturbances there, assisted by the 
(native) Governor of the province, who, under the law 
already alluded to, was ex-officio sheriff of the court, 
and an army of deputy sheriffs, as it were, the con- 
stabulary, numbering several hundred. The outbreak 
of July 10th was always known afterwards as "the 
Tauiran affair." This Tauiran affair was a raid by 
an outlaw band on the barrio of Tauiran, one of the 
hamlets of the municipal jurisdiction of the township 
called Gandara, in the valley of the Gandara River, 
in north central Samar, wherein one hundred houses, 
the whole settlement, were burned, and twenty-one 
people killed. The term of court lasted from early in 
August until early in November. The day after the 
Tauiran affair, over on the other fork of the Gandara 
River, occurred what was called "the Cantaguic affair. " 
Cantaguic was a hamlet or barrio about the size of 
Tauiran. The brigands killed the lieutenant of police 
of Cantaguic and some others, but they did not kill 
everybody in the place. Instead, after killing a few 
people, they went to the tribunal (town hall), seized 
the local teniente, or municipal representative of Ameri- 



Governor Wright — 1904 457 

can authority, tied the American flag they found at 
the tribunal about the head of the teniente, turban 
fashion, poured kerosene oil on it, and took the teniente 
down stairs and out into the public square, where they 
lighted and burned the flag on his head, the chief of 
the band, one Juliano Caducoy by name, remarking 
to the onlookers that the act was intended as a lesson 
to those serving that flag. They then cut off the lips 
of the teniente so he could not eat (he of course died a 
little later), burned the barrio and carried off fifty of the 
inhabitants. Caducoy was captured some time after- 
ward, and I sentenced him to be hanged. There was 
practically no dispute about the facts. After the 
Cantaguic affair, during the term of court mentioned, 
the provincial doctor, Dr. Cullen, an American who had 
been a captain doctor of volunteers, had occasion to 
run up to Manila. The doctor was a most accomplished 
gentleman, but he had a fondness for the grewsome in 
description equal to Edgar Allan Poe himself. After he 
came back he told me about having told the Governor- 
General of the Cantaguic affair, and repeated with an 
evident pleased consciousness of his ability to make his 
hearer's blood curdle, how the Governor had said to 
him slowly, " Doctor, that — is — awful !" 

Blood seemed to whet the appetite for slaughter. 
The records of the August-November, 1904 term of the 
court of first instance of Samar show all the various 
barrios of the Gandara Valley in flames on successive 
days, after the affairs of July 10th and nth. I do not 
speak from memory, but from documents contained in 
a large bundle of papers kept ever since, in memory of 
that incarnadined epoch. You find one barrio burned 
one day and another another day, until all the people 
of the Gandara Valley were made homeless. One of 
the constabulary officers, Lieutenant Bowers, a very 



45 8 American Occupation of Philippines 

gallant fellow, testified before me that from July ioth 
to the date of his testimony, which was on or about 
September 28th, some 50,000 people had been made 
homeless in Samar by the operations of the outlaws. 
I deem Lieutenant Bowers's estimate quite reasonable. 
His figures include only one-fifth of the population of 
an island which was in the throes of an all-pervading 
brigand uprising. The conservative nature of Lieu- 
tenant Bowers's estimate concerning the mischief that 
had already been wrought by the end of September, 
1904, and was then gathering destructive potentiality 
like a forest or prairie fire, may be inferred from the 
contents of a memorandum appearing below, furnished 
me by a Spanish officer of the constabulary, a Lieu- 
tenant Calderon, who had been an officer of the Rural 
Guard in the Spanish days. It contains a list of fifty- 
three towns, villages, and hamlets (a barrio may be 
quite a village, sometimes even quite a town, though 
usually it is a hamlet) burned up to the date the memo- 
randum was furnished me. 

In order to a clear understanding of these Samar 
massacres and town-burnings of 1904, as well as for 
general geographical purposes, a few preliminary words 
of explanation will be appropriate just here. A prov- 
ince in the Philippines has heretofore been likened to 
a county with us. But in the largest provinces, the 
subdivisions of provinces called municipalities are more 
like counties; and each municipality is in turn sub- 
divided into sections called barrios. A municipality 
(Spanish, pueblo) in the Philippines is not primarily a 
city or town, as we understand it, i. e. t a more or less 
continuous settlement of houses and lots more or less 
adjacent, but a specific area of territory, a township, 
as it were. This area or territory may be 5 x 10 square 
miles, or 10 x 20, or more, or less. For example, 



Governor Wright — 1904 459 

Samar' s area is 5276 square miles. Yet it contained in 
1904, and probably still contains, only twenty-five 
townships or municipalities all told, each municipality 
being subdivided in turn into barrios. Municipalities 
in the Philippines vary in size as much as counties 
do with us, and their total area accounts for and 
represents the total area of the province, just as 
the total area of the counties of a State represents 
with us the total area of the State. The seat of 
government of the municipality always bears the 
same name as the municipality itself, just as the 
county seat of a county usually, or frequently, 
bears the same name as the county, with us. Take 
for instance, the name of the first municipality or 
township in the list which appears below, Gandara. 
The municipality of Gandara might be described by 
analogy as the "county" of Gandara, the list of 
barrios burned as a list of towns and villages of the 
" county" of Gandara. 

The municipality of Gandara included a watershed 
in north central Samar from which the Gandara River 
flowed in a southwesterly direction to the sea. Within 
this watershed, parallel \2 x /z north of the equator 
intersects the 125th meridian of longitude east of 
Greenwich. Northern Samar is a very rich hemp 
country, Catarman hemp being usually quoted higher 
than any hemp listed on the London market. If you 
stand at the highest point of the Gandara watershed 
you can see four streams flowing off north, northwest, 
northeast, and southwest to the sea. There are some 
half dozen streams having their source there. Brigands 
making their headquarters there could always, when 
hard pressed, get away in canoes toward the sea in 
almost any direction they wished. The following is 
Lieutenant Calderon's list: 



460 American Occupation of Philippines 

RELACION POR MUNICIPIOS DE LOS BARRIOS QUEMADOS. 
(List by Municipalities of the Barrios Burned.) 

MUNICIPALITY OF GANDARA 

Tauiran July 10 

Cantaguic July 12 

Cauilan July 13 

Erenas July 16 

Blanca Aurora July 19 

Bulao 1 July 21 

Pizarro August 8 

Cagibabago August 8 

Nueva August 10 

Hernandez August 10 

San Miguel August 10 

Buao August 15 

El Cano August 17 

San Enrique August 20 

San Luis August 25 

MUNICIPALITY OF CATBALOGAN 

(Calderon's List of Barrios Burned, continued) 

Malino July 31 

Silanga August 9 

Ginga August 13 

San Fernando August 1 5 

Maragadin August 20 

Talinga August 2 1 

Santa Cruz August 22 

Dap-dap August 29 

Palencia August 3 1 

Albalate (date not given) 

Villa Hermosa (date not given) 

1 Bulao was situated on a high bluff on the left bank of a river called 
the Bangahon. The Pulajans entered before daybreak, on July 21st. 
There was a stiff fight at Bulao, also, between our native troops and 
the enemy on August 21st, but Calderon seems to have left it out 
of his list. See Gen. Wm. H. Carter's Report for 1905, War Depart- 
ment Report, 1905, vol. iii., p. 290. Capt. Cary Crockett, a descendant 
of David Crockett, commanded the constabulary, and though badly 
wounded himself, as were also half his command, he defeated a force 
of Pulajans greatly outnumbering his, killing forty-one of them. 
Report U. S. Philippine Commission, 1905, pt. 3, p. 90, Report of 



Governor Wright — 1904 461 

The above list of villages burned in the township of 
Catbalogan shows how bold the Pulajans had then 
grown. By that time they were committing depreda- 
tions, robbery, murder, and town-burning, in all the 
various villages within the municipal jurisdiction of the 
township of Catbalogan, coming often within a few 
miles of the town proper of Catbalogan itself, the seat 
of the provincial government. In the attack on Silanga, 
which occurred August 9th, a number of people were 
killed. Silanga was but little more than an hour's 
walk from the court-house at Catbalogan. The 
Governor at once wired Manila as follows: 

Catbalogan, Samar, Aug. 9, 1904. 

Executive Secretary, Manila: 

The peaceably inclined people of the barrios near here 
are collecting here in large numbers, terrorized by Pulajans 
who are boldly roaming the country, burning barrios 
within seven or eight miles from Catbalogan. They kill 
men, women, and children without distinction. These 
Pulajans have fled from Gandara where they are being 
actively pursued by constabulary. All forces that could 
be spared have gone out. We have about thirty available 
fighting men here. Pulajans liable at any time to enter 
Catbalogan. We are in danger of some occurrence quite 
as serious as the Surigao affair. 1 There are buildings here 
which I must protect at all hazards — Treasury, Provincial 
Jail with ninety-five prisoners, and commissary and ord- 
nance stores of constabulary. We need at once at least 

Col. Wallace C. Taylor. I think he was awarded a medal of honor for 
his work. He certainly earned it. 

"Pulajan" means "red breeches," the uniform of the mountain 
clans, worn whenever they set out to give trouble. 

1 Of March 23d of the previous year, already described in a previous 
chapter, where Luther S. Kelly — "Yellowstone" Kelly — saved the 
American women by gathering them and a few men in the Government 
House and bluffing the brigands off. 



462 American Occupation of Philippines 

three hundred men, scouts if possible, to handle situation, 
between here and Gandara. Pulajans undoubtedly have 
friends in Catbalogan. I suspect certain of the municipal 
authorities here. I estimate number of Pulajans now 
operating at about five hundred. 

{Signed) Feito, Governor. 

On September 2d, the Provincial Governor of Samar 
sent to Manila the following telegram: 

Catbalogan, Sept. 2, 1904. 

Carpenter, Actg. Ex. Secy., Palace, Manila: 

Seven-thirty this evening simultaneous reports from 
north and south sides of town Pulajans approaching. 
They have not entered yet and may not, but have gathered 
Americans with wives and children in my house. Arms 
supplied. Treasury twenty-five thousand Conant. 1 One 
hundred forty prisoners in jail. Only forty-seven con- 
stabulary here. If Pulajans enter much needless sacrifice 
life pacific citizens here. Feel sure Pulajans have friends 
in Catbalogan. Request company either scouts or sol- 
diers from Calbayog stationed here, preferably former. 
Their presence guarantee stability. 

{Signed) Feito, Governor. 

Of course Governor Feito did not call for the 
regular army of the United States. His job, poor 
devil, was to demonstrate as best he could that 
the military were not needed. He would at once 
have been suspected of trying to scuttle the ship 
of "benign civil government" if he had admitted 
that the regular army was needed. But to return 
to Calderon's list: 

1 The "Conant" peso, named for the noted fiscal expert, Mr. Conant. 
It was worth fifty cents American money. 



Governor Wright — 1904 463 

MUNICIPALITY OF CALBAYOG 1 

(Calderon's List of Barrios Burned, continued) 

Ylo August 17 

Napuro August 17 

Balud, August 17 

MUNICIPALITY OF WRIGHT 

(Calderon's List of Barrios Burned, continued) 

Guinica-an July 25 

Calapi July 28 

Bonga. August 4 

Tutubigan August 19 

Motiong September 1 

Lau-an October 10 

San Jose (date not given) 

A sample of the distressing communications I was 
getting as these massacres progressed is the notification 
of the Motiong affair of September 1st set forth below, 
which I give as a type of the methodical stoicism of 
those bloody times. Motiong was seven miles down the 
coast road from Catbalogan : 

In the district of Motiong, municipality of Wright, 
province of Samar, Philippine Islands, September I, 1904. 

In the presence of the undersigned Peregrin Albano, 
member of the village council, there being also present the 
president of the Municipal Board of Health, Mr. Tomas San 
Pablo, and the principal men of the place, there has this 
day occurred the burial of the corpses, victims of the 
Pulajans, in the cemetery of this place, to wit: The 
officer of volunteers, Rafael Rosales, and the following 

1 The Fourteenth U. S. Infantry was stationed in garrison just out- 
side the town proper of Calbayog, which was three hours by steam 
launch from the provincial capital, Catbalogan. But the depredations 
might have been carried to just outside the line of the military reserva- 
tion, and the military folk would not have dared to make a move save 
on request first made by the Civil Government at Manila. In other 
words the above three villages were burned under their noses. 



464 American Occupation of Philippines 

volunteers, viz., Gualberto Gabane, Juan Pacle, Dionisio 
Daisno, Pedro Damtanan, Carmelo Lagbo; also the two 
women, Eustaquia Sapiten and Apolinaria N., also one 
unknown Pulajan. This in fulfilment of the official letter 
of instructions No. 136, from the office of the presidente 
of the town of Wright dated to-day. Said burial ceremonies 
were conducted by the Reverend Father Marcos Gomez, 
and were attended by the whole volunteer force of this 
place because of the death of their officer Rosales. 
Tomas San Pablo, Peregrin Albano, 

President of the Board of Health. Councillor. 

{Illegible) Moro, 

Captain of Volunteers. l 

Fancy having documents like the foregoing handed 
you with ever-increasing regularity as you sauntered, 
morning after morning, from your bath to your coffee 
and rolls, preparatory to the daily sifting of incidents 
such as that which included the burning of the American 
flag on the head of the municipal representative of 
American authority already mentioned, and other like 
acts of poor misguided peasants stirred up by trifling 

1 One seems to get the stoicism better in the original, somehow, so I 
give the body of the original Spanish, as it came to me: 

En el distrito de Motiong, municipio de Wright, provincia de Samar, 
Islas Filipinas, a primero de septiembre de mil novecientos quatro. 
Ante mi Peregrin Albano, consejal del mismo, y presente el Presidente 
de Sanidad Municipal, D. Tomas San Pablo y principales del mismo se 
procedio al enterramiento de los cadaveres victimas de los Pulajans 
en el sementerio de esta localidad el oficial de voluntaries, Rafael 
Rosales y otros voluntarios, Gualberto Gabane, Juan Pacle, Dionisio 
Daisno, Pedro Damtanan, Carmelo Lagbo, y particulares Eustaquia 
Sapiten y Apolinaria N: con otro tanto Pulajan desconocido; en con- 
formidad de la carta oficial de la presidencia municipal de Wright de 
fecha de hoy registrada con el numero 136. 

Del citado enteramiento ha sido asistido por el Reverendo Padre 
Marcos Gomez y acompanado por toda la fuerza voluntaria del mismo 
por la muerte del oficial Rosales. 



Governor Wright — 1904 465 

scamps representing the dregs of insurrection. Motiong 
was not only within seven miles of the court-house at 
Catbalogan, but it was so near to Camp Bumpus, over 
in Leyte, where the 18th Infantry lay, that an order 
to them to move in the morning would have made life 
and property in all that brigand-harried region safe 
that night and continuously thereafter. 

General Wm. H. Carter, Major-General U. S. A., 
well known to the American public as the able officer 
who, in 191 1, commanded the United States forces 
mobilized on the Mexican border during the Mexican 
revolution of that year, that ousted President Diaz and 
seated President Madero, was in command at the time — 
the fall of 1904 — of the military district of the Philip- 
pines which included Samar and Leyte. A word of 
request to him would have made life definitely safe 
in all the coast towns and their vicinity within two 
or three days after receipt of such a request. 

Besides Gandara, Catbalogan, Calbayog, and Wright, 
Lieutenant Calderon's list included the trio of ill- 
fated municipalities set forth below, concluding with 
the illustrious name of Taft: 

MUNICIPALITY OF CATUBIG 

Poblacion September 5 

Tagabiran August 1 1 

San Vicente August — 

Catubig was toward the north end of Samar. On 
the day of the burning and sacking of the poblacion 
of Catubig, September 5th, which was done by a force 
of several hundred Pulajans, the scouts and constabu- 
lary, so it was afterward reported, killed a hundred of 
the Catubig Pulajans in an engagement. If this report 
were correct, as is likely, it was the biggest single 
killing of natives since the early days of the insur- 
30 



466 American Occupation of Philippines 

rection. ■ But it did not in the least check the Pulajan 
insurrection, which simply swerved its fury from the 
Catubig region toward the coast (the Pacific coast), 
descending upon the towns, villages, and hamlets of 
the townships of Borongan and Taft, thus: 

MUNICIPALITY OF BORONGAN 

(Calderon's List of Barrios Burned, continued) 

Sepa Sept. 23 

Lucsohong Sept. 23 

Maybocog Sept. 23 

Maydolong Sept. 23 

Soribao Sept. 23 

Bugas Oct. 10 

Punta Maria Oct. 10 

Canjauay Oct. 1 1 

MUNICIPALITY OF TAFT 

(Calderon's List continued) 

Del Remedio Sept. 22 

San Julian . Sept. 22 

Nena Sept. 22 

Libas Sept. 22 

Pagbabangnan Sept. 22 

San Vicente Sept. 22 

Jinolaso Oct. 3 

Of the twenty-five pueblos or townships of Samar, 
the Calderon list only pretended to throw light on 
events in nine of them, those being the only ones from 
which definite news had then reached headquarters. 
But as a reign of terror prevailed all over Samar at the 
time, the rest may be imagined, though it can never be 
ascertained. Of these nine, the last two were: 

MUNICIPALITY OF LLORENTE 

Pagbabalancayan Sept. 23 

* See War Department Report, 1905, vol. iii., p. 290. 



Governor Wright — 1904 467 



MUNICIPALITY OF ORAS 



Concepcion Sept. 23 

Jipapad — 

Now it feels just as uncomfortable to be boloed in 
Pagbabalancayan as it would in a place with a more 
pronounceable name, and the same is true of the com- 
paratively mellifluous Jipapad. True, some of these 
places were mere hamlets of twenty to forty houses, but 
you may be sure there were five or six people, on an 
average, to each house. On the other hand, glance 
back again at the list of towns of the township of Taft 
that were sacked and burned, and consider that San 
Julian was about the size of the provincial capital, 
Catbalogan, and that Catbalogan, the town proper, 
contained a population of four thousand, though looked 
at from the amphitheatre of hills which surround it, 
Catbalogan does not look like such a very large group 
of houses. Filipino houses are usually full of people. 
It is easier to live that way than to build more houses. 

After the Pulajan descent on Llorente, the people 
of Llorente all went off to the hills to the Pulajans for 
safety. They were not allowed to have firearms. 
This was forbidden by law, except on condition of 
making formal application for permission, getting it 
finally approved, and giving a bond, conditions which, 
in practical operation, made the prohibition all but 
absolute. The law was general for the whole archi- 
pelago. The theory of the law was that the inhabitants 
were under "the peace and protection of a benign civil 
government." The real reason of the law was that if 
the people were allowed to bear arms it was very uncer- 
tain which side they would use them on, our side or the 
other. But, by 1904, the lowland and coast people of 
Samar would have been glad enough to have stuck to 



468 American Occupation of Philippines 

us and gone out after the mountain robber bands had 
we armed them. Left unprotected, a feeling seemed to 
spread in many places that about the only thing to 
do to be safe was to depart from under the " protection " 
of the American flag and take to the hills and join, or 
seem to join, the uprising. 

Toward the last of September, the provincial treas- 
urer of Samar, an American, a Mr. Whittier, visited 
the east coast of Samar, including Taft. On October 
5th, he stated before me as follows : 

All the presidentes that I have talked with, and this man 
Hill, 1 said that they wanted some protection for their 
towns. Except at Borongan there are no guns in the hands 
of the municipal police. 2 This band near Taft was said 
to have nineteen guns, and they felt they could not defend 
their towns with spears against these guns. There were 
reported to be between 200 and 600 in operation on the 
coast at that time, and they felt that they could not defend 
their towns with the means at hand. I found at Taft that 
they had taken all the records of the municipality, and the 
money, and taken it over to an island away from the main 
coast, in order to protect their money and their records, and 
I understand the same thing was done at Llorente. At 
Oras they had practically decided to take the same step if 
it became necessary. All of the commercial houses on the 
east coast and a large number of people congregated at 
Borongan, which was safe on account of the protection of 
the constabulary; and the constabulary there were doing 
very good work, doing everything they could with their small 
force, and they (the presidentes) felt that if they had guns 
in the hands of the municipal police or if they had the con- 

1 Hill was Whittier's deputy at Llorente. 

2 Even if the municipal police had been like Caesar's wife, they were 
like chaff before the wind in a Pulajan foray, though they were somewhat 
better if well led by some prominent and forceful man of the community 
in an expedition after Pulajans. 



Governor Wright — 1904 469 

stabulary to guard their towns, they could go out after 
these people themselves. 



The importance of all this testimony, relatively to 
its forever sickening any one acquainted with it with 
colonization by a republic, is that a transcript of Mr. 
Whittier's statement of October 5th was placed in the 
hands of the Governor- General a few days later by Mr. 
Harvey, the Assistant Attorney-General, and yet this 
situation continued until shortly after the presidential 
election. Several years afterwards, in the North 
American Review, Judge Ide, who was Vice-Governor 
in 1904, after admitting that he was in constant con- 
sultation with the Governor-General all through that 
period (by way of showing his opportunities for know- 
ing whereof he spoke), denied that the failure to order 
out the military to protect the people from massacre 
had any relation whatever to the presidential election 
then going on in the United States. 

Mr. Whittier also stated before me that the total 
population of the municipality of Taft was 18,000, and 
that twenty-five men armed with guns in each of the 
four principal villages thereof that were burned would 
have prevented the destruction of those villages. So 
we did not protect the people, and we would not let 
them protect themselves. I do not select the pueblo 
of Taft on account of its distinguished name. "What 's 
in a name?" The fate of Taft and its inhabitants was 
simply typical of the fate which descended upon scores 
of other places in "dark and bloody" Samar between 
the outbreak of July 10, 1904, and the presidential 
election of November 8th, of that year, and between 
those two dates the shadow of such a fate w T as over all 
the towns of the island on which it did not in fact de- 
scend. Mr. Whittier stated to me informally that at 



470 American Occupation of Philippines 

the time he was speaking of in the above formal state- 
ment, there were pending and had been pending for a 
long time (he seemed to think they must have been 
pigeon-holed) applications for permission to bear arms 
from fifteen different pueblos. After Mr. Whittier had 
finished his statement the Presidente of Taft made 
a like statement on the same day, October 5th. My 
retained copy shows that this official bore the ponderous 
name of Angel Custodio Crisologo. He declared a 
willingness to lead his people against the Pulajans if 
given guns, though the fervent soul did qualify this 
martial remark by adding, "If I am well enough," 
explaining that the presidential body was subject to 
rheumatism. Mr. Crisologo stated among other things 
that there had been eight hundred houses burned in the 
jurisdiction of Taft before he left the east coast for Cat- 
balogan — about a week before. Like Mr. Whittier's, 
a copy of Mr. Crisologo 's statement was delivered a 
few days later to the Governor- General in person 
by the Assistant Attorney- General, Mr. Harvey, 
who had been present when it was made and taken 
down. 

This Mr. Harvey need not be, to the western hemi- 
sphere reader, a mere nebulous antipodal entity, as the 
Hon. Angel Custodio Crisologo might. He is a very 
live American, a very high-toned gentleman, and an 
excellent lawyer, and was at last accounts still with 
the insular government of the Philippine Islands, 
though in a higher capacity (Solicitor General) than he 
was at the date of the events herein narrated. There 
was very little congenial society in Catbalogan when 
Mr. Harvey came there to help dispose of the criminal 
docket, and his advent was to me a very welcome oasis 
in a desert of "the solitude of my own originality" — 
or lack of originality. On September 19th I had wired 



Governor Wright — 1904 471 

Vice-Governor Ide that there were 172 prisoners in 
the jail awaiting trial and "many more coming." 
Of course no justice of the peace would be trusted to 
pass on whether an alleged outlaw should or should not 
be held for trial. If he were secretly in sympathy with 
the discomfiture American authority in Samar was 
having, he might let the man go, no matter what the 
proof. Also he might seek to clear himself of all 
suspicion in each case by committing men against whom 
there was no proof, thus unnecessarily crowding an 
already fast filling provincial jail of limited dimensions, 
wherein beriberi 1 was already making its dread 
appearance. 

So the writ of habeas corpus remained unsuspended, 
thus making it possible to so state in later official certifi- 
cates covering that period. But habeas corpus cut no 
more figure in the situation than it did at the battle 
of Gettysburg, or at the crossing of the Red Sea by the 
chosen people, or at the sinking of the Titanic. The 
constabulary would worry along with such force as they 
had in the island of Samar, only a few hundred, certainly 
nearer five hundred than one thousand. And, whenever 
they had a battle with the outlaws, if they themselves 
were not annihilated, which happened more than once, 
they would bring back prisoners in droves and put them 
in the jail, and I was expected to sift out how much proof 
they had, or claimed to have, of overt acts by persons 
not actually captured in action. Of course a race then 
began, a race against death, to see whether death or I 
would get to John Doe or Richard Roe first. And 
though I held court every day except Sunday from 

1 A disease of a dropsical variety, usually attacking the legs first, 
which easily becomes epidemic. It had been the cause of many of the 
120 deaths in the Albay jail during the Ola insurrection. Ideal condi- 
tions for it are a steady diet of poor rice and lack of exercise. 



472 American Occupation of Philippines 

August to November 8th, sometimes getting in sixteen 
hours per day by supplementing a day's work with a 
night session, death would often beat me to some one 
man on the jail list whom I happened to have picked 
out to get to the next day. Men so picked out were 
men as to whom something I might have heard held out 
the hope of being able to dispose of their cases quickly 
by letting them loose, * thus getting that much farther 
from the danger limit of crowding in the jail. Some of 
these would be specially picked out because reported 
sick. I kept track of the sick by visiting them my- 
self when practicable, and talking to them. Of course 
many of them were brigands — Pulajans — but some of 
them were the saddest looking, most abject little 
brigands that anybody ever saw. Of course you might 
catch some nasty disease from them, but nobody, 
somehow, ever seemed to have any apprehension on 
that score in the Philippines. This does not argue 
bravery at all. It is merely the listless stoicism that 
lurks in the climate. I recollect going to walk one after- 
noon, after adjourning court at 5 o'clock, saying to 
the prosecuting attorney before adjourning, "We will 
take up the case of Capence Coral in the morning; 
there does not seem, from what I can understand, to 
be enough proof to convict him of anything." Of 
course when you were dealing with hundreds of people, 
you did not have any nerve-racking hysterics about 
any one man. Leaving the court-house I passed by the 
hospital, where Capence had been transferred, pending 
the arrival of witnesses against him and the rest of the 
crowd captured with him. I asked the hospital steward 

1 It was not well to be too hasty. You might have the head of the 
whole uprising in custody, or one of his most important lieutenants, and 
find it out by the merest accident in the course of hearing a case against 
some apparently abject "private of the rear rank." 



Governor Wright — 1904 473 

how Capence was. The answer was he had died at 
4 : 45 — some twenty minutes before. Death had beat 
me to Capence. When I meet Capence he will know 
I did the best I could. I was under a great strain, a 
sort of writ of habeas corpus incarnate, the only thing 
remotely suggesting relief from unwarranted x detention 
on the whole horizon of the situation. I was trying 
to do the best I could by the Constitution, in so far as 
the spirit of it had reached the Philippines. I broke 
down totally under the strain about November 8th r 
came home in the spring of the following year and 
remained an invalid for several years thereafter; and 
as a noted corporation lawyer once said after recovery 
from a similar illness, "I haven't had much constitu- 
tion since, but have been living mostly under the 
by-laws." 

American office-holding in the Philippines is not so 
popular with the Filipinos as to have moved them to any 
outburst of gratitude in the shape of an effort to create 
a pension system for Americans who lose their health 
in the government service out there. When they leave 
the Islands they become as one dead so far as the 
Philippine insular government is concerned. And 
the men whose health is more or less permanently impaired 
by disability incurred in line of duty in the Philippines 
are not and will never be numerous or powerful enough 
back home to create any sentiment in favor of a pension 
system for former Philippine employees, since the 
Philippine business is not a subject of much popular 
enthusiasm at best. So if I had not had private 
resources, the results of the Samar insurrection of 1904 
would have left me also in the pitiable plight in which 
I have beheld so many of my repatriated former com- 

1 By unwarranted I mean without warrant. Nobody bothered much 
with warrants. The times were too strenuous. 



474 American Occupation of Philippines 

rades of the Philippine service in the last seven years, 
to whom the heart of the more fortunate ex-Filipino 
indeed goes out in sympathy. But to return to the race 
to beat death to prisoners in that grim and memorable 
fall of 1904. 

In September the crowded condition of the jail had 
begun to tell on the inmates. The constabulary force 
at Catbalogan was quite inadequate for the varied 
emergencies of the situation, there being, besides the 
town itself to protect, the provincial treasury to guard, 
the governor's office, the court-house, and the jail. 
Consequently the jail guard was too small. The jail 
buildings were in an enclosure a little larger than a 
baseball diamond, surrounded by high stone walls. 
But it was not safe to let the inmates sleep out in the 
enclosure at night. They had to be kept at night in 
the buildings. Any American who has visited the 
central penitentiary at Manila called Bilibid has seen 
a place almost as clean as a battleship. This is Ameri- 
can work. But the Filipinos are not trained in sanitary 
matters, and all they know about handling large crowds 
of prisoners they learned from the Spaniards. The 
Governor was a native half-caste, a very excellent man, 
but free from that horror, which I think is an almost 
universal American trait, of seeing unnecessary and 
preventable sacrifice of human life, no matter whose the 
life. I inspected the jail as often as was practicable, 
and managed to keep down the death-rate below what it 
might have been, the prisoners being allowed to go out 
in the open court during the day. They also had such 
medical attention as was available. However, during 
the last five or six weeks of that term of court I would 
be pretty sure to find on my desk every two or three 
days, on opening court in the morning, a notice like 
this : 



Governor Wright — 1904 475 

Carcel Provincial de Samar, I. F. 
Oficina del Alcaide 

Catbalogan, Samar, I. P., 

22 de Septiembre de 1904. 
Hon. Sr. Juez de I a Instancia de esta provincia, 
Catbalogan, Samar, I. F. 
Senor : 

Tengo el honor de poner en conocimiento de ese juzgado, 
que anoche entre 12 y 1 de ella, fallecio el procesado, Ramon 
Boroce, a consecuencia de la enfermedad de beriberi, que 
venia padeciendo. 

Lo que tengo el honor de communicar a ese Juzgado para 
su superior conocimiento. 

De U. muy respetuosamente, 

GONZALO LUCERO, 

Alcaide de la Carcel Provincial. 

which being interpreted means: 

Provincial Jail of Samar, P. I. 

Catbalogan, Samar, P. I., 

September 22, 1904. 
His honor, the Judge of First Instance of this province, 
Catbalogan, Samar, P. I. 
Sir: 

I have the honor to bring to the knowledge of the court 
that last night between 12 and 1 o'clock, the accused person 
Ramon Boroce died in consequence of the disease of beri- 
beri from which he has been suffering; which fact I have 
the honor to communicate to the court for its superior 
knowledge. 

Very respectfully, 

GONZALO LUCERO, 

Warden of the Provincial Jail. 

Now a jail death-rate of only ten or twelve a month 
was not at all a bad record for an insurrection in a 
Philippine province. It would be rank demagoguery 



476 American Occupation of Philippines 

at this late date to be a party to anybody's getting 
excited about it. I was rather proud of it by compari- 
son with the jail death-rate of the Alb ay insurrection 
of the year before, where 120 men had died in the jail 
in about six months. But it began to get on one's 
nerves to have to expect a billet-doux like the above on 
your desk at the opening of court each day, when the 
accused person had had no commitment trial and may 
have been wholly innocent. It all came back to the 
difference between war and peace, viz., that in war it is 
to be expected that many innocent persons will suffer, 
but that in peace only the guilty should suffer. More- 
over, in war that admits it is war, your agents, your 
army, are better able to handle crowds of prisoners 
than native police and constabulary, and the percentage 
of innocent who suffer with the guilty in such war will 
be far less ; whereas the contrary is true of war — waged 
by constabulary checked by courts — which pretends that 
a state of peace exists, i. e., which pretends there is no 
need for declaring martial law and calling on your 
army. 

It was this Samar insurrection which convinced me 
that waging war with courts and constabulary in lieu 
of the recognized method was, in its net results, the 
cruelest kind of war, and that the civil government of 
the Philippines was a failure, in so far as regarded Mr. 
McKinley's original injunction to the Taft Commission ; 
where, after alluding to the articles of capitulation of 
the city of Manila to our forces, which concluded with 
the words : 

This city, its inhabitants * * * and its private property 
of all descriptions * * * are placed under the special safe- 
guard of the faith and honor of the American Army, 

he added: 



Governor Wright— 1904 477 

As high and sacred an obligation rests upon the Govern- 
ment of the United States to give protection for property 
and life * * * to all the people of the Philippine Islands. 
I charge this commission to labor for the full performance 
of this obligation, which concerns the honor and conscience 
of their country. 

Commenting on this in his inaugural address as 
Governor of the Philippines, Governor Taft had said: 

May we not be recreant to the charge, which he truly 
says, concerns the honor and conscience of our country. 

No matter who was to blame, here we were in Samar, 
with the 14th Infantry three hours away in one direction 
at Calbayog, doing nothing, and the 1 8th Infantry five 
hours away in another direction, at Tacloban, doing 
nothing, and a reign of terror going on in Samar, with 
the peaceably inclined people of the lowdands and coast 
towns appealing to us for protection and not getting it, 
sometimes crouching in abject terror without knowing 
which way to fly, sometimes taking to the hills and 
joining the outlaws as a measure of self-preservation. 
*T was pitiful, wondrous pitiful ! I then and there 
decided that we ought to get out of the Philippines as 
soon as any decent sort of a native government could 
be set up, and that our republic was not adapted to 
colonization. In his North American Review article 
above cited, in denying that the unwillingness of the 
Manila government to order out the army in Samar 
in the fall of 1904 had anything to do with the possible 
effect so doing might have had on the presidential 
election, then in progress in the United States, Governor 
Ide rebuked me with patronizing self-righteousness 
thus: "Was Judge Blount opposed to kindness?" 
He means in giving the Filipinos, under such circum- 



47 8 American Occupation of Philippines 

stances, the "protection of civil government," instead 
of ordering out the army. No, but I was opposed to 
using a saw, in lieu of a lancet, in excising the ulcers 
of that body politic at that time. In protesting that 
there was " nothing sinister" about the failure to use 
the troops, Judge Ide cunningly wonders whether my 
attitude was subsequently assumed after I left the 
Islands because of "proclivities as a Democrat," or 
whether it was merely due to "predilections in favor of 
military rule." Read Mr. McKinley's instructions to 
the Taft Commission, above quoted, that to protect 
life and property concerned the honor and conscience 
of their country, and consider if the Ide suggestion 
does not seem to hide its head and slink away in shame 
before the strong clear light of what was then a plain 
duty. As a matter of fact Judge Charles S. Lobinger, 
who is still with the Philippine judiciary, visited me 
en route to another point, during that Samar term of 
court, and he will recall, should he ever chance upon this 
book and this chapter, with what vehemence I said to 
him at the time, in effect, "Judge, we belong in the 
Western Hemisphere. We have no business out here 
permanently." If proclivities and predilections in 
favor of affording decent protection to the lives and 
property of defenceless people by properly garrisoning 
their towns constitutes lack of kindness, then the Ide 
rebuke was well taken. 

These details are not related with Pickwickian gravity 
in order to acquaint the reader with my utterances as 
being important per se. But it is important to make 
clear to the reader, and he is entitled, in all frankness, 
to have it made clear by one who has now so long 
detained his attention on this great subject, to know 
just when "the light from heaven on the road to Damas- 
cus" broke upon this witness, and how and why he 



Governor Wright — 1904 479 

came to be in favor of Philippine independence, because 
the reasons which convinced him may seem good in 
the sight of the reader also. If the man who reads this 
book shall see that the man who wrote it was, in Samar 
in 1904, neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but 
simply an American in a far distant land, jealous of 
the honor of his country's flag in its capacity as a symbol 
of protection to those over whom it floated, then the 
work will not have been written in vain. 

The presidentes or mayors of the various pueblos 
were in session at Catbalogan in semi-annual convention 
during the first few days of October, 1904, when the 
Assistant Attorney-General, Mr. Harvey, visited Cat- 
balogan. Mr. Harvey and the writer had taken a 
number of long walks together in the suburbs of 
Catbalogan, though Major Dade, commanding the 
Samar constabulary, an officer of the regular army, had 
warned us it was not safe outside of town. We had 
talked over the situation fully. Besides all its other 
aspects, there were a number of American women in 
Catbalogan, an American lawyer's wife, the wife of the 
superintendent of schools, her sister, and others. It 
was not at all likely that the Pulajans would enter 
Catbalogan, but there was always the possibility, not 
to be wholly ignored, that some such episode as that of 
March 23d, of the preceding year, at Surigao, already 
described, might be repeated. As hereinbefore noted, 
on August 9th, the Pulajans had done some killing and 
burning at Silanga, less than ten miles north of Cat- 
balogan and likewise at Motiong, less than ten miles 
south of Catbalogan, on September 1st, and on the 
evening of September 2d, about 7:30, there had been 
a false alarm caused by some native of Catbalogan 
running down the main street yelling, " Pulajans! Pula- 
jans!" All of which did not tend to make you feel 



480 American Occupation of Philippines 

that your American women were quite as entirely safe 
from harm as they ought to be. 

In the course of one of our walks Mr. Harvey and I 
had stopped on the mountain side overlooking Catba- 
logan, to catch our breath and take in the view of the 
town below and the sea beyond. I said to him, because 
I knew his mind also was on the one great need of the 
hour: "Yes sir, if President Roosevelt were here, and 
could see this situation as we do, he would order out 
the army and protect these defenceless people, no 
matter which way the chips might fly." Mr. Harvey 
agreed with me. He promised to go back to Manila 
and tell the authorities there so. After we came back 
to town, we were advised that the convention of 
presidentes desired to have Mr. Harvey favor them with 
an address. He said, "What shall I tell them?" I 
said, "Tell them that if they will do their duty by the 
American Government, the American Government will 
do its duty by them." He spoke Spanish fluently, 
made a good speech, and told them in effect just that 
thing. Then he went back to Manila, and shortly 
afterward wrote me the two letters which follow: 

Department of Justice, Philippine Islands, 
Office of the Assistant Attorney-General 

for the Constabulary, 

Manila, P. I., October 15, 1904. 
My dear Judge: We arrived in Manila on Tuesday 
morning, the nth instant, and I prepared my report and sub- 
mitted it to the attorney-general on the 12th, in the mean- 
time making a transcript of your summary and delivering, 
a copy of same with other information to the attorney- 
general along with my report. After dictating the report 
and before delivering it I had a conversation with General 
Allen on the situation in Samar and told him what my 
recommendations would be. He agreed that rewards 



Governor Wright — 1904 4 81 

should be offered for the capture of Pablo Bulan, Antonio 
Anogar, and Pedro de la Cruz, but took issue on the other 
recommendations, and to my mind he takes a very extreme 
view; but I thought at the time and still think that he 
wanted to tone me down in my feelings in the matter. I 
think the real cause for his opposition is the effect that he 
fears an aggressive attitude might have on the presidential 
election. In other words, whatever they do aggressively 
might be misconstrued and made use of as political capital. 

At Governor Wright's request I got the report from the 
attorney-general before it was sent up and went over to the 
Malacanan, and the governor read the report and read most 
of the data that I submitted with the report, including your 
summary, and while he did not say much what he did say 
convinced me that there would be something doing if it 
were not on the eve of election, and in my opinion there will 
be things doing in Samar within thirty days. 

I inclose herewith a copy of your summary, and also a 
copy of my report to the attorney-general. On the 18th 
instant I received your telegram to hold the completion of 
your summary until receipt of a letter mailed by you that 
day. I telegraphed you in reply that my report and your 
summary were placed in the hands of the attorney-general 
on the 1 2th instant. If there is any additional data in 
your letter mailed on the 13th I will submit it to the proper 
authorities. 

For the lack of time, I will close, and write more next 
time. 

Very truly yours, 

{Signed) Geo. R. Harvey, 

Assistant Attorney-General. 

Department of Justice, Philippine Islands, 

Office of the Assistant Attorney-General, 

for the Constabulary, 

Manila, P. I., October 19, 1904. 
My dear Judge Blount: Since mailing my letter to 
you of last Saturday I have found the copies of your sum- 
31 



482 American Occupation of Philippines 

maryon the situation in Samar and inclose two herewith,, 
in accordance with my promise. 

This week we have received some good news from Samar 
with reference to important captures and killings of Pula- 
jans. I am not in touch with what is going on with refer- 
ence to Samar, and can give you no information along that 
line. As I remember, the governor told me the other day 
when I was talking with him that one more company of 
scouts will be sent down right away. 

I sincerely hope the situation is improving, and that you 
are getting along rapidly in disposing of the large docket 
before you. If there is not a very great improvement in 
the situation by the 9th of November, I think there will 
be a considerable movement of troops in Samar within 
thirty days. For the good of the government, I hope the 
situation will improve materially before that time. I would 
like to see them put the troops there right now. I am of 
the opinion that it would not affect the election a half- 
dozen votes, and it might save two or three or a half-dozen 
massacres and the destruction of much property. 

With best wishes for your success in your work, and with 
regards to Mr. Block, I am, 

Very truly yours, 

Geo. R. Harvey, 
Assistant Attorney- General, Philippines Constabulary. 

To Hon. James H. Blount, 
Judge of First Instance, Catbalogan, Samar, P. I. 

These two letters may be found at p. 2532, Congres- 
sional Record, February 25, 1908, where they were the 
subject of remark in the House of Representatives by 
Hon. Thomas W. Hardwick of Georgia, apropos of 
Governor Ide's North American Review article of 
December, 1907. 

A few weeks after the presidential election I saw Mr. 
Harvey in Manila. We naturally talked about Samar 
and his two letters to me. The troops had then been 



Governor Wright — 1904 483 

ordered out. He referred to his conference with the 
Governor-General and stated, "Yes, he told me that 
was the reason," meaning that the reason for not 
ordering out the troops was the one assigned in his 
(Harvey's) letter to me, viz., "Whatever we do ag- 
gressively might be misconstrued and made use of as 
political capital. " 

On October 18, 1904, there was received at Manila 
the following cablegram concerning the presidential 
campaign in the United States: 

New York, 16th. Judge Parker, in addressing campaign 
clubs at Esopus the past week returned to the subject of 
the Philippines in the evident hope of making it a para- 
mount issue of the campaign. He repeated his former 
declaration that the retention of the Philippines and the 
carrying out of the policy of the Republican Administration 
have cost six hundred and fifty millions of dollars and two 
hundred thousand lives. Secretary of War Taf t, in address- 
ing a mass meeting held in Baltimore, Saturday night, 
ridiculed Judge Parker's statement and characterized his 
figures as alarmist. 

Of course Judge Parker's figures were rather high — 
of which more anon. He was not going to miss any- 
thing in the way of a chance of "getting a rise" out 
of the Administration, by understatement. But some 
statement from the Philippines at once became a 
supremely important desideratum, to counterbalance 
Judge Parker's over-statement, some optimism to 
meet the Parker pessimism. Encouraged by the public 
interest aroused by the figures furnished him, and the 
consequent apparent uneasiness it created in "the 
enemy's camp," Judge Parker soon had the whole 
Philippine group of islands going to "the demnition 
bow-wows." On October 20th, Secretary of War 



484 American Occupation of Philippines 

Taft cabled Governor Wright, then Governor- General 
of the Islands, a long telegram, quoting Judge Parker 
as having used, among other language descriptive of 
the beatitudes we had conferred on our little brown 
brother, the following: " The towns in many places in 
ruins, whole districts in the hands of ladrones." 1 

At that time the whole archipelago was absolutely 
quiet for the nonce, except Samar. Samar was the 
only island where Judge Parker's statement was true, 
and as to Samar, it was absolutely true. On October 
23d Governor Wright wired Secretary of War Taft 
as follows : 

There is nothing warranting the statement that towns 
are in ruins. It is not true that there are whole districts 
in the hands of ladrones. Life and property are as safe 
here as in the United States. 2 

This was followed by a perfectly true and correct 
picture of the peace and quiet which then prevailed 
for the time being everywhere throughout the archi- 
pelago, except in Samar, which dark and bloody isle 
was specifically excepted. Then followed a statement 
as to Samar, full of allusions as elaborately optimistic 
as any of the Taft cablegrams of 1900, to impliedly 
inconsiderable " prowling bands" of outlaws in Samar. 
Of course nobody at home knew the answer to this, so 
it silenced the Parker batteries, and the Samar mas- 
sacres proceeded unchecked. Meanwhile the 14th 
Infantry at Calbayog, Samar, and the 18th Infan- 
try, at Tacloban, Leyte, smiled with astute, if con- 
temptuous, tolerance, at the self-inflicted impotence 
of a republic trying to make conquered subjects behave 
without colliding too violently with home sentiment 

1 See New York Tribune, Oct. 25, 1904. 2 Ibid. 



Governor Wright — 1904 4 8 5 

against having conquered subjects ; sang their favorite 
barrack room song, 

He may be a brother of Wm. H. Taft, 
But he ain't no friend of mine; 

and continued to enjoy enforced leisure. They did 
chafe under the restraint, but it at least relieved them 
from the not altogether inspiring task of chasing Pula- 
jans through jungles and along the slippery mire of 
precipitous mountain trails, and at the same time per- 
mitted the secondest second lieutenant among them to 
swear fierce blase oaths, not wholly unjustified, about 
how much better he could run the Islands than they were 
being run. 

On October 26th, I wired Governor Wright at 
Manila as follows : 

Since my letter of October 6th, situation appears worse. 
Additional depredations both on east and west coast. 
Smith-Bell closing out. 1 Reliable American residing in 
Wright says that during week ending last Sunday thirteen 
families living along river Nacbac, barrio of Tutubigan, 
said pueblo, kidnapped by brigands and carried off to hills. 
This means some sixty people having farms along river, 
rice ready to be harvested. Seven of the eleven barrios of 
Wright have been burned. 

Blount. 

When I sent that telegram of October 26th, the 
situation in the pueblo of Wright was typical of the 
reign of terror throughout the island. Wright could 
have been reached by the 18th Infantry (then over at 
Tacloban, in Leyte), and garrisoned on eight hours' 
notice. But I had little hope that the telegram would 

1 Smith, Bell & Co. are an old British mercantile house, well known 
in Manila and Hong Kong. 



486 American Occupation of Philippines 

stir the 18th. The best man I had ever personally 
known well in high station was at the head of the 
government of the Islands, and as he was my friend, 
I sat down to think the situation out, determined, with 
the prejudice which is the privilege of friendship, to 
analyze his apparent apathy, and to conjecture how 
many times thirteen families " having farms along 
river, rice ready to be harvested" would have to be 
carried off to the hills by the brigands in order to move 
the 1 8th Infantry before the presidential election. 
Then I wondered just how many seconds it would have 
taken a British governor-general, backed by unanimous 
home sentiment concerning the wisdom of having 
colonies, to have acted, had a great British colonial 
mercantile house like Smith, Bell & Co. appealed to 
him for protection of its interests. And that brought 
me, there on "the tie-ribs of earth," as Kipling would 
phrase it, to the fundamentals of the problem. The 
British imperial idea of which Kipling is the voice 
and Benjamin Kidd the accompanist is based, super- 
ficially, upon a supposed necessity for the control of 
the tropics by non- tropical peoples, though fundamen- 
tally, it is an assertion of the right of any people to 
assume control of the land and destinies of another 
when they feel sure they can govern that other better 
than that other can govern itself. Is this proposition 
tenable, and if so, within what limits? Is it tenable to 
the point of total elimination of the people sought to 
be improved? If not, then how far? How far is 
incidental sacrifice of human life negligible in the 
working out of the broader problem of "the greatest 
good of the greatest number?" In his article in the 
North American Review for December, 1907, Governor 
Ide makes exhaustive answer to "the doctors who for 
some months past, in the columns of the North American 



Governor Wright — 1904 487 

Review and elsewhere, have published prescriptions 
for curing the ills of the Filipino people," including 
Senator Francis G. Newlands, Hon. William J. Bryan, 
and the writer. In the course of disposing of the quack 
last mentioned, Governor Ide gets on rather a high 
horse, asking, with much dignified indignation, "How 
many people in the United States would have known 
or cared whether the army was or was not ordered out 
in Samar in 1904?" I concede that the solicitude was 
a super-solicitude, as do the Harvey letters, but like 
them, I must recognize its reality. However, when 
Governor Ide reaches this rhapsody of conscious virtue: 
"It is inconceivable that the Commission could have 
been animated by the base and ignoble partisan preju- 
dices thus charged against them," capping his climax 
by triumphantly pointing out that "Governor-General 
Wright was a life-long Democrat, " he doth protest too 
much. For the angelic pinions he thus attaches to 
himself are at once rudely snapped by the reflection 
that a very short while after his article came out in 
the North American Review Governor Wright became 
Secretary of War in President Roosevelt's Cabinet, 
and a little later took the stump for Taft and Sherman, 
in 1908. Governor Wright did not stoop to deny or 
extenuate his share in the matter, and I honor him for 
it. 1 But to stick to your own crowd and then deny 
afterwards that you did so — that is another story. 
However, let us brush aside such petty attempts to 
cloud the real issue, which is: How many people 

1 The North American Review article by the writer, to which Judge 
Ide was replying, appeared in the issue of that magazine for January 18, 
1907, and could hardly have escaped the attention of anybody con- 
cerned, having been given wide circulation : (i) by Mr. Andrew Carnegie 
through pamphlet reprints; (2) by Hon. Wm. J. Bryan, in his paper, the 
Commoner; (3) by Hon. James L. Slayden, M. C. of Texas, through 
reprinting in the Congressional Record. 



488 American Occupation of Philippines 

would Governor Wright and Vice-Governor Ide have 
permitted to be massacred by the Pulajans in Samar in 
1904 before they would have ordered out the military 
prior to the presidental election? Let us consider the 
case, not with a view of clouding the issue, but of 
clearing it. The truth is, Governor Wright was very 
gravely concerned about the Samar situation from 
August to November, 1904. Of course it is due to 
him to make perfectly clear that he did not realize the 
gravity of that situation as vividly as those of us who 
were on the ground in Samar, four or five hundred miles 
away. But the information hereinbefore reviewed, 
conveyed to him by the Provincial Governor, by Mr. 
Harvey, the Assistant Attorney General sent to Samar 
for the express purpose of getting the Manila govern- 
ment in possession of the exact situation, and by myself, 
was certainly sufficient to make him "chargeable with 
notice" of all that happened thereafter, certainly 
chargeable with knowledge of all that had happened 
theretofore. Of course there was General Allen, the 
commander-in-chief of the constabulary, at Manila, 
presumably speaking well of his command — the right 
arm of the civil government — presumably giving 
industrious and tactful aid and comfort to the idea that 
the authorities could afford to worry along with the 
constabulary alone until after the presidential election. 
But that could not discount the actual facts reported 
from the afflicted province by the officials on the ground. 
General Allen, it should be noted, remained in Manila 
all this time. So that any Otis-like ' ' situation-well -in- 
hand" bouquets he may have thrown at his subordi- 
nates in Samar, and the situation there generally, were 
mere political hothouse products, surer to be recognized 
as such by the shrewd kindliness of the truly consider- 
able man at the head of the government than by most 



Governor Wright — 1904 4 8 9 

any one else he could hand them out to. That man 
knew, to all intents and purposes, in the great and 
noble heart of him, what was really going on in Samar. 
He knew that massacres had been occurring, and that 
they were likely to keep on occurring. In other words, 
he knew that preventable sacrifice of life of defenceless 
people was going on, and that he could put a stop to it 
any time he saw fit. The question he had to wrestle 
with was, should he stop it, knowing the "Hell fer 
Sartin" the Democratic orators in the United States 
would at once luridly describe as " broke loose" in 
the Philippines? I insist that there is no use for any 
holier-than-thou gentleman to become suffused with 
any glow of indignant conscious rectitude based on the 
premises we are considering. Better to look a little 
deeper, on the idea that you are observing your republic 
in flagrante colonizatione, with as good a man as you 
ever have had, or ever will have, among you, as the 
principal actor. Governor Wright's course was entirely 
right, if the Philippine policy was right. If his course 
was not right, it was not right because the Philippine 
policy is fundamentally wrong. Governor Wright of 
course believed that the Philippine policy was right. 
I myself did not come finally to believe it was wrong 
until it was revealed in all its rawness by the period now 
under discussion. Of course the Governor did not 
vividly realize that the American women in Catbalogan 
were not entirely safe. If he had, he would have 
rushed the troops there, politics or no politics. But 
native life was politically negligible. What difference 
would a few score, or even a few hundred, natives of 
Samar make, compared with that pandemonium of 
anarchy and bloodshed all over the archipelago which 
Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide had long been insisting 
would follow Philippine independence? Was the whole 



49° American Occupation of Philippines 

future of 8,000,000 of people to be jeopardized to save 
a few people in Samar? That was the moral question 
before the insular government, in its last analysis. 
And the government faced the proposition squarely, 
and answered it "No." 

I will go farther than this. If I had believed, with 
Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide, that Philippine inde- 
pendence meant anarchy in the Islands, and the ortho- 
dox ' ' bloody welter of chaos, " I too might have hesitated 
to order out the troops on the eve of the election, and 
my hesitation, like theirs, might have continued until 
the election was safely over. So might yours, reader. 
Don't be so certain you would not. Practically absolute 
power, sure of its own benevolence, has temptations to 
withhold its confidence from the people that you wot not 
of. Don't condemn Governor Wright. Condemn the 
policy, and change your republic back to the course 
set by its founders. Give the Philippine people the 
independence they of right ought to have, instead of 
secretly hoping to unload them on somebody else, 
through the medium of your next great war. 

The question of whether the troops should have been 
ordered out or not at the time above dealt with is by 
no means without two sides. On the " bloody welter" 
side, you have the well-known opinions of Messrs. 
Taft, Wright, and Ide. On the other side you have 
before you — for the moment — only my little opinion. 
So instead of having in Governor Wright a Bluebeard, 
you simply have a man of great personal probity and 
unflinching moral courage, following his convictions 
to their ultimate logical conclusion without shadow of 
turning, in the act of colonization. In other words, 
Mr. American, you see yourself, as others see you. 
So face the music and look at yourself. In your colony 
business, you are a house divided against itself, which 



Governor Wright — 1904 491 

cannot stand. On the other hand, I knew the Filipino 
people far more intimately than either Mr. Taft, 
Governor Wright, or Judge Ide. I spoke their lan- 
guage — which they did not. I had met them both in 
peace and in war — which they had not. I had held 
court for months at a time in various provinces of the 
archipelago from extreme northern Luzon to Mindanao 
— which they had not. I had met the Filipinos in 
their homes for years on terms of free and informal inter- 
course impracticable for any governor-general. It 
was therefore perfectly natural that I should know 
them better than any of these eminent gentlemen. 
I was not prepared to be in a hurry about recommending 
myself out of office by assenting that our guardianship 
over the Filipinos should at once be terminated, but 
I knew there was nothing to the " bloody welter" 
proposition. The home life of the Filipino is too alto- 
gether a model of freedom from discord, pervaded as 
it is by parental, filial, and fraternal love, and their 
patriotism is too universal and genuine, to give the 
" bloody welter" bugaboo any standing in court. 

But whosoever questions for one moment Governor 
Wright's high personal character, simply does not know 
the man. To do so, moreover, would fatally cloud the 
issue I have sought to make clear between his view of 
the duty of our government and my own. In his 
moods that reminded one of Lincoln, Governor Wright 
used to say : " Don't shoot the organist, he 's doing the 
best he can." It is true that his answer to Judge 
Parker was not a full and frank statement of the case. 
But did it lie in American human nature, when your 
antagonist was recklessly over-stating the case in the 
heat of debate on the eve of a presidential election, to 
take him into your confidence and tell him all you 
knew, in simple trusting faith that he would thereafter 



49 2 American Occupation of Philippines 

quit exaggerating? To permit the dispute to boil 
down to the real issue, viz., how many lives it was per- 
missible to abandon on the "greatest good to the great- 
est number" theory, would obviously jeopardize the 
existence of a government which the Governor of the 
Philippines naturally believed to be better for all 
concerned than any other. And there is your cul-de- 
sac. Hinc illce lachrymce. 

We can point with pride to many things we have done 
in the Philippines, the public improvements, r the school 
system, the better sanitation, and a long list of other 
benefits conferred. But in the greatest thing we have 
done for them, we have builded wiser than we knew. 
"God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to per- 
form. ' ' In fourteen years we have welded the Filipinos 
into one homogeneous political unit. In a most 
charming book, entitled An Englishwoman in the 
Philippines, 2 we can see our attempts to fit govern- 
ment by two political parties into over-seas colonization 
caricatured without sting until we really remind our- 
selves of a hippopotamus caressing a squirrel. In one 
passage the British sister describes our programme as 
one ' ' to educate the Filipino for all he is worth, so that 
he may, in the course of time, be fit to govern himself 
according to American methods; but at the same time 
they have plenty of soldiers to knock him on the head 
if he shows signs of wanting his liberty before the 
Americans think he is fit for it" — "A quaint scheme, " 
she naively adds, "and one full of the go-ahead 
originality of America." 

The more we teach the Filipinos, the more intimately 

1 Such as the breakwater at Manila, the road-building in various 
provinces, etc. — all, however, be it remembered, being paid for by the 
Filipino people, out of the insular revenues and assets. 

2 By Mrs. Campbell Dauncey. 



Governor Wright — 1904 493 

they will become acquainted, in their own way, with the 
history of the relations between our country and theirs 
from the beginning, including the taxation without 
representation, through Congressional legislation (here- 
inafter noticed) placed or kept on our statute-books 
by the hemp trust and other special interests in the 
United States. And they will learn all these things 
in the midst of a ''growing gulf between the two 
peoples." 1 

In fourteen years we have made these unwilling 
subjects, whom we neither want nor need any more than 
they want or need us, a unit ; a unit for Home Rule in 
preference to alien domination, it is true; but, never- 
theless, a patriotic unit — one people — a potential body 
politic which can take a modest, but self-respecting 
place in the concert of free nations, with only a little 
more additional help from us. 

In the handling of an insurrection in any given pro- 
vince with courts and constabulary during the first four 
or five years after the Taft government of the Philip- 
pines was founded, the function of a representative of 
the office of the Attorney- General, coming from Manila 
to help the local prosecuting attorney handle a large 
docket and a crowded jail, was by no means remotely 
analogous to that of a grand jury. He originated 
prosecutions, found "No Bill, " etc. When Mr. Harvey 
came to Samar, he came direct to the court room, and I 
suspended the trial of the pending case, and, after 
greeting him, began an informal talk which was akin 
to the nature of a charge to a grand jury, putting him 
in possession of the general aspects of the uprising. He 
was a very just and kindly man, and entered into the 
spirit of the task. I elaborated on the class of cases 

1 Words used by Governor-General James F. Smith, in an address 
at the Quill Club, Manila, January 25, 1909. 



494 American Occupation of Philippines 

where the defendant claimed, as most of them did, ' ' Yes, 
I joined the band of brigands, but I was made to do so. " 
It was also indictable to furnish supplies to the public 
enemy. This presented the class of cases where the 
brigands would swoop down on a town and demand 
rice, and not getting it, would sometimes kill the persons 
refusing it, and so intimidate the rest into finding rice 
for them. Also there was the class of cases where a 
man would claim to have been one of the inhabitants 
of an unprotected town who had gone off to the hills 
in a body, for safety, to propitiate the mountain people 
by becoming part of them. This sort of thing at one 
time threatened to become epidemic with all the coast 
towns. It did not, however. A modus Vivendi of 
some sort, sometimes express, sometimes merely tacit, 
w T ould be arranged between the coast people and the 
hill people. These modus vivendi arrangements en- 
abled the coast people to obtain a certain degree of 
safety, in lieu of that we should have secured them but 
did not, by making the hill folk believe that the coast 
men were against us and for them. At one time the 
prosecuting attorney got hold of evidence sufficient to 
authorize the issuance of a warrant for the Presidente 
of Balangiga, the man supposed to have engineered 
the massacre of the 9th Infantry in September 1901. 
I authorized the issuance of the warrant for his arrest. 
But the native governor of the province, and also 
Major Dade, the American regular officer commanding 
the constabulary, satisfied me that we did not have 
force sufficient to protect Balangiga from the Pulajans, 
if we arrested the presidente, who, being persona grata 
to the Pulajans, was able to keep them from descending 
on his town. To arrest him would therefore mean, in 
their opinion, that the people of Balangiga would take 
to the hills for protection, and join the hill folk, or Pula- 



Governor Wright — 1904 495 

jans, and if a town as large as Balangiga set any such 
example all the coast towns might follow it. So the 
supposed perpetrator of the 9th Infantry massacre was 
allowed to remain unmolested. The American court 
was impotent to enforce its processes. 

In my mass of Philippine papers there is one contain- 
ing a copy of my remarks to the Assistant Attorney- 
General on his arrival at Catbalogan, above referred to 
as analagous to a charge to a grand jury at home. 
It is dated Catbalogan, Samar, September 28, 1904, 
and is headed: "Remarks by the court upon the 
occasion of the arrival of Assistant Attorney-General 
Harvey, with regard to the recent disturbances in 
Samar, and the cases for brigandage and sedition 
growing out of the same." Certain parts of this 
contemporary document will doubtless give the reader a 
more vivid apprehension of the then situation than he 
can get from mere subsequent description. Of course 
the visiting representative of the Attorney-General's 
office was familiar in a general way with the manner of 
the handling of the Albay insurrection in the previous 
year, described in the chapter preceding this. In dis- 
cussing the Samar situation the " remarks'' of the court 
contain, among other things, this passage : 

In the cases growing out of the Albay disturbances there 
were a great many people who strayed out to the mountains 
just like cattle. They did not know why or whither they 
went. As to those persons, Judge Carson, Mr. Ross, and 
myself were unanimous in the opinion that some of them 
could be indicted under the vagrancy law. There were 
others of a greater degree of guilt, but who did not appear 
to have been what you might call ordinary thieves, and we 
were all agreed to indict those under the sedition law, the 
limit of which is ten years and ten thousand dollars. Thus 
you do not force upon a Judge of First Instance the respon- 



496 American Occupation of Philippines 

sibility of sentencing a man to twenty years of his life for a 
connection with bandits which may be but little more than 
technical. Besides those two classes, there were in Albay 
of course the bandits proper, to whom the bandolerismo 
[brigandage] law was specially intended to apply. There 
cannot be any doubt about the fact that this bandolerismo 
law is one of the most stringent statutes that ever was on 
the statute-books of any country. It is very far from the 
purpose of this court to attempt to say what would be the 
wisest legislation, or to say that this is not the very best 
legislation, under the circumstances. How we administer 
the several laws alluded to governing public order, will settle 
whether or not substantial justice is done. 

The men in the United States who in those days were 
slinging mud at the Philippine trial judges as being 
"subservient," wholly missed the core of the wdiole 
matter. In the provinces where so many heavy sen- 
tences were imposed, the real situation was that a 
state of war existed, and the judges believed, and I 
think correctly, that they were practically a military 
commission of one, and much more able to give a pris- 
oner a square deal, tempering justice with mercy, than 
officers briefly gathered from the scenes of the fighting 
to act as a military commission. We tried those men 
with as little prejudice as if they had just come from 
the moon. Moreover, from the italicized concluding 
words of the above excerpt from my talk to the Assis- 
tant Attorney-General, it will be seen that the court 
had practically unlimited discretion in the matter of 
punishment, and was, in fact, about the only court oj 
criminal equity in the annals of Anglo-Saxon juris- 
prudence. 

In the last analysis, the righteousness or unright- 
eousness of a civil government in a country not yet 
entirely subjugated, depends on whether more innocent 



Governor Wright — 1904 497 

people suffer through completing the work of subju- 
gation with constabulary whose "prisoners of war" 
are tried, to see what they may have done, if anything, 
by one-man courts, or whether more innocent people 
suffer through completing the work of subjugation as 
any other great power on earth but ourselves would have 
completed it, with an army, trying the prisoners by mili- 
tary commission. Unless you yourself were a traitor 
to your country, you considered as criminal attempts to 
subvert your government by cut-throats that no one 
of the respectable Filipinos, from Aguinaldo and Juan 
Cailles down, would have hesitated to have shot sum- 
marily. But you sought to make the punishment in 
each case fit the crime, by ascertaining as dispassionately 
as if the defendant were fresh from the moon, just what 
each accused man had himself done. Either Aguinaldo, 
or an American military commission would have had 
such people shot in bunches, as not entitled to be treated 
as prisoners of war. The trouble with the civil govern- 
ment did not lie in its judiciary, but in its constabulary. 
It was the physical handling of the crowds of prisoners 
by the constabulary, and their failure, because not 
numerous enough, to protect peaceably inclined people, 
which made it a fact that turning the situation over to 
the military would have meant less sacrifice of the 
innocent along with the guilty. It is much more merci- 
ful to kill a few hundred people, as a lesson to the rest, 
and let the rest go, with the clear understanding that if 
they insurrect again you will promptly kill a few hundred 
more, than to permit a reign of terror from one month to 
another and from one year to another, with all the 
untilled fields, famine, pestilence, and other disease this 
involves, merely in order to be able to invoke the bless- 
ing of the Doctor Lyman Abbots of the world on a 
supposedly benign "civil" government. 



49 8 American Occupation of Philippines 

In all my sentences, and in all his indictments, Mr. 
Harvey and the writer sailed close to the wind, by 
holding only those responsible who had taken active 
parts in the sacking and burning of villages and the 
massacre of their inhabitants. I knew that sooner or 
later some officious prosecuting attorney of less noble 
mould than Harvey would ask me to convict some poor 
creature of brigandage for giving a little rice to the 
brigands, and my mind was made up to refuse to do so, 
and in so refusing to commit heresy once and for all 
by expressing my sentiments, in the decision, concerning 
the failure to give adequate protection to defenceless 
people, along the lines indicated in this chapter. No 
such case was in fact presented. I broke down under 
the strain of graver cases early in November and left 
Samar forever, bound for Manila. 

Before I left, the whole island was seething with sedi- 
tion. I was told by a credible American that the chief 
deputy sheriff of the court, an ex-insurgent officer, 
one of the " peace-at-any-price " policy appointees, had 
remarked among some of his own people where he did 
not expect the remark to be repeated: "I see no use 
persecuting our brethren in the hills. " The municipal 
officials of the provincial capital, Catbalogan, were 
suspected by the native provincial governor, and the 
latter in turn was suspected by the Manila government. 
In fact the whole political atmosphere of the island had 
become full of rumor and suspicion as to who was for 
the government, and who was against the government. 
I left Samar, November 8th, which was the day of the 
presidential election of 1904, determined to try no 
more insurrections. By that time nearly everybody 
in the island was more or less guilty of sedition, and I 
did not know the method of drawing an indictment 
against a whole people. 



CHAPTER XIX 
Governor Wright — 1905 

My heart is heavy with the fate of that unhappy people. 

Speech of Hon. A. O. Bacon in U. S. Senate. 1 

BECAUSE the especially cordial relations which 
existed to the last between Governor Wright and 
myself 2 are familiar to a number of very dear mutual 
friends, I deem it due both to them and to myself, in 
view of the contents of the preceding chapter, to state 

1 Delivered in 1902, after the Senator visited the Islands in 1901. 

2 The following is a copy of the letter accepting my resignation: 

Office of the Civil Governor of the Philippine Islands, 

January 25, 1905. 
My dear Judge Blount: 

I have to acknowledge the receipt of your communication of 
yesterday in which you tender your resignation as Judge of First 
Instance at large. I regret extremely that your ill-health has made this 
course imperative. Under all the circumstances, however, I am satis- 
fied that you have acted wisely, as I have feared for some time that you 
would be unable to perform the duties pertaining to your office because 
of your physical condition. I, therefore, though with much regret 
accept your resignation. 

At the same time I beg to express my appreciation of the faithful 
and efficient services you have rendered in the past. I hope very much 
that a rest and change of climate may have the effect of restoring you 
again to vigorous health, and I assure you that you carry with you my 
best wishes for your future prosperity and happiness. 

Sincerely yours, 

Luke E. Wright, 

Civil Governor. 
To the Honorable James H. Blount, 

Judge of First Instance at large, Manila, P. I. 
499 



500 American Occupation of Philippines 

that I see no reason why, in writing a history of the 
American Occupation of the Philippines, I should omit 
or slur the facts which convinced me that that occupa- 
tion ought to terminate as soon as practicable, and that 
any decent kind of a government of Filipinos by Filipi- 
nos would be better for all concerned than the McKinley- 
Taft programme of Benevolent Assimilation whereof 
Governor Wright was the legatee. By the thousand 
and one uncandid threads of that programme, slowly 
woven from 1898 to 1904, as indicated in the first 
sixteen chapters of this book, Governor Wright had 
found himself as hopelessly bound to concealment from 
the American people of the real situation in Samar 
in the fall of 1904, as a Gulliver in Lilliput. 

When I finally left Samar and came to Manila, in 
November, 1904, I was not prepared to figure out how 
or how soon, the blunder we made by the purchase of 
the Philippine archipelago could be corrected. But my 
mental attitude toward the whole Philippine problem 
had undergone a complete change. In 1901 Governor 
Wright, then Vice- Governor, had written me: "You 
younger men out here, who have cast your fortunes 
with this country, are to be, in all likelihood, in the 
natural course of events, its future rulers." Up to 
1903 I had clung to that idea with the devotion of what 
was really high and earnest purpose, untroubled with 
misgivings of any kind. In November, 1903, in 
Albay, Judge Carson and myself had talked over the 
long struggle of the civil government to walk without 
leaning on the military, and, with the readiness of one 
vested with authority to believe such authority wisely 
vested, and the readiness of a civilian lawyer to jealously 
guard the American home idea that the military should 
be subordinate to the civil authority, I had cordially 
agreed with a sentiment one day expressed by Judge 



Governor Wright— 1905 501 

Carson concerning Governor Taft about "the splendid 
moral fibre of the man," meaning in keeping the mili- 
tary from prancing out of the traces. After Governor 
Taft left the Islands to be Secretary of War (December 
2 3> I 9°3)» an d while I was still in Albay, I had learned 
of the 120 men who had died in the Albay jail while 
awaiting trial, and thereafter something of the magni- 
tude of the Ola insurrection there, and that had given 
me pause as to the practical benevolence of the opera- 
tion of "a benign civil government. " Then the Samar 
massacres of 1904, and the gory panorama I had there 
witnessed, had finally convinced me that a republic 
like ours is wholly unfitted to govern people against 
their consent. But I did not tell anybody in Manila 
all these things. I simply pondered them. Grover 
Cleveland was the only man in the world I would have 
liked to talk to just then freely and fully. And he 
was not about. "My heart was heavy with the fate 
of that unhappy people" as Senator Bacon had said 
in the Senate in 1902, after visiting the Islands in 1901. 
I did not condemn Governor Wright. I quite realized 
that I was "up against" about the largest ethical prob- 
lem of world politics, one on which the nations are much 
divided, and that I was not infallible. I did not say to 
the Governor : ' ' Governor, let 's resign and go home and 
tell our people that this whole business is a mistake." 
Nor did I ever lose faith in Governor Wright personally. 
If I had, I might just as well have said : "After this, the 
deluge." I would simply have lost faith in human 
nature. I had not then, nor have I since, known a man 
of higher personal character. I had simply lost faith in 
Benevolent Assimilation, and begun to take the Filipino 
people seriously as a potential nation, probably better 
able to handle their own domestic problems than we 
will ever be able to handle them for them. 



502 American Occupation of Philippines 

The day after I resigned, Mr. Justice Carson, of the 
Supreme Court, and Mr. Wilfley, the Attorney- General, 
came to call on me. My friends knew I was very 
much troubled over the Samar business. I was doing 
some grumbling, but without specifying, because to 
specify would mean that we all of us ought to give up 
the life careers we had planned for ourselves in the 
Islands. I knew the old familiar answer a grumbler 
was sure to get in the Philippines, viz., "Old man, 
you Ve been out here too long. You better go home. " 
But I did a little more grumbling to my friends Judge 
Carson and Mr. Wilfley, during the course of their 
visit. They could both pretty well guess what was the 
matter. But Judge Carson and I had come out in 
1899, and had served through the war together. He 
knew all about the Albay business, and somewhat of 
the Samar business. Wilfley had not come out until 
the civil government was founded in 1901. Mr. 
Wilfley said cheerily: "Oh, Blount, you are too 
conscientious." I shall never forget what happened 
then. Judge Carson said, with a ring of something like 
anger in his tone: "No, Wilfley, I '11 be d — d if 
he is." Is it any wonder that ever since I have worn 
that man, as Hamlet would say, "in my heart's core"? 
Here was as brave and true an Irishman as ever gained 
distinction on battlefield or bench. And he understood. 
He did not say — which was the implication of Wilfley 's 
tone — "Old man, you 've been out here too long, and 
illness has made you peevish." He knew what was 
the matter. He knew that as trial judges he and I had 
not been small editions of Lord Jeffries, as some of our 
American critics had implied. but he also knew 

THAT THERE WAS NO METHOD OF DRAWING AN INDICT- 
MENT AGAINST A WHOLE PEOPLE. 

Possibly the intensity of my feelings on this great 



Governor Wright — 1905 503 

subject, then and ever since, hampers the power of 
clear expression. Therefore, a word more in attempt 
at elucidation. In 1898, Judge Carson and I, with 
many thousands of other young Americans, had trooped 
down to Cuba, in the wake of the impetuous Roosevelt, 
to free the inhabitants of that ill-fated island from 
Spanish rule, drive the Spaniards from the Western 
Hemisphere, and put a stop to Spain's pious efforts 
"to spare the great island from the dangers of premature 
independence," as she always expressed her attitude 
toward Cuba. We had many of us been fired by the 
catchy Roosevelt utterance which did so much to bring 
on the Spanish War, viz., "The steps of the White 
House are slippery with the blood of the Cuban reconcen- 
trados. " Then in 1899, we had gone to the Philippines, 
and had ever since been engaged there in "sparing the 
Islands from the danger of premature independence," 
and the Samar massacres of 1904 were, to me, the 
apotheosis of the work. So that after November 
8, 1904, I felt "The steps of the White House are 
slippery with the blood of the people of my district." 
It had all been done under the pious pretence that 
the Filipinos welcomed our rule — a pretence which 
had taken the form for six years of systematic as- 
severation that they did so welcome it. Yet it was 
not true that they, or any appreciable fraction of 
them, had ever welcomed our rule. And it never will 
be true. Surely no man can see in this book any 
scolding or unkindness. It is an attempt merely to 
bring home to my countrymen a strategic fact, a 
fact which it is folly to ignore. But to return to the 
thread of our story. 

Four days after the presidential election of 1904, to 
wit, on November 12th, Governor Wright left Manila 
and went to Samar, including in his itinerary various 



504 American Occupation of Philippines 

others of the southern islands. 1 Soon after their 
return, the seven hundred native troops in Samar were 
increased to nearly two thousand, and sixteen companies 
of regulars (say one hundred men to a company) were also 
thrown into Samar. It took until the end of 1906 to 
end the trouble. You cannot find in the reports of the 
civil authorities anything explaining their three or four 
weeks' stay in the Visayan Islands in November- 
December, 1904, that is not absolutely in accord with 
the original Taft obsession of 1900 about the popularity 
of the proposed alien " civil" government with its 
subjects. Governor Wright's description of the trip 
says: "The warm hospitality of the Filipino people 
made this trip of inspection a most agreeable one." 
As a matter of fact, on such occasions, the more dis- 
affected a leader of the people was, the more he would 
seek, by "warm hospitality," "warm" oratory telling 
the visiting mighty what the visiting mighty longed to 
hear, parades, fiestas, etc., to divert suspicion of sedition 
from himself. The poor creatures had met General 
Young's cavalry column in northern Luzon in 1899 
with their town bands, doing the only thing they knew 
of to do to "temper the wind to the shorn lamb" — i.e., 
to temper it to their several communities — many of 
them doubtless expecting to be put to the sword by 
General Young's troopers, as the Cossacks did the 
Persians during the brief and sensational sojourn of 
that brilliant young administrator, Hon. W. Morgan 
Shuster, in Persia in 1911-12. I have no doubt that 
high on the list of those extending some of the "warm 
hospitality" above mentioned appeared the name of 
Don Jaime de Veyra. Yet in the summer of 1904 Don 
Jaime had gotten out of a sick bed to attend a conven- 

1 See annual report of the Governor-General for 1905 , in Report of the 
Philippine Commission for 1905, pt, 1, p. 85. 



Governor Wright — 1905 505 

tion called to send delegates to the Democratic National 
Convention in the United States that year, 1 and also, 
in that same year, had run for Governor of Leyte on a 
platform the principal plank of which was Carthago est 
delenda — " Carthago" being us, the American regime. 
De Veyra was defeated that time, but ran again the 
next time and was elected. While the writer is not 
one of those who seek to show their " breadth of view" 
by gossiping with outsiders regarding what is peculiarly 
our own affair, still, the British view-point of the 
situation in the Visayan Islands, as conveyed by an 
Englishwoman whose husband was engaged in mercan- 
tile business there in 1904-5, and who therefore was 
certainly in a position to know the opinion of the little 
circle of British people at Cebu and Iloilo, may not 
be superfluous here. This lady, living then at Iloilo, 
wrote a series of letters to friends back home in England 
which she afterwards published in book form. 2 In a 
letter dated Iloilo, January 22, 1905 (page 86), she 
says: 

The Americans give out and write in their papers that 
the Philippine Islands are completely pacified, and that the 
Filipinos love Americans and their rule. This, doubtless 
with good motives, is complete and utter humbug, for 
the country is honeycombed with insurrection and plots; 
the fighting has never ceased; and the natives loathe the 
Americans and their theories, saying so openly in their 
native press and showing their dislike in every possible 
fashion. Their one idea is to be rid of the U. S. A. * * * 
and to be free of a burden of taxation which is heavier 
than any the Spaniards laid on them. 

1 Which delegates were denied admission to the Convention on the 
ground that no American living in the Philippines could be in sympathy 
with the Democratic programme as to them. 

2 An Englishwoman in the Philippines, by Mrs. Campbell Dauncey. 



506 American Occupation of Philippines 

illso an Englishman who was in Samar in 1904-5, 
a Mr. Hyatt, who, with his brother, served with the 
American troops there in the bloody Pulajan uprising, 
afterwards wrote a book called the Little Brown Brother, 
wherein he fully corroborates Mrs. Dauncey's appre- 
ciation of the situation during that period. 

In its blindness to the unanimity of Visayan discon- 
tent, as manifested in its report now under considera- 
tion, the civil government of the Philippines was not 
trying wilfully to deceive anybody. It was deceiving 
itself. It was obeying the law of its life, its existence 
having been originally predicated on the consent of a 
great free people to keep in subjection a weaker people 
eager to be also free, such consent having been obtained 
through diligent nursing of the original idea that the 
subject people were not in fact so eager, but were, on 
the contrary, in a mental attitude of tearful welcome 
toward the proffered protection of a strong power. 
In his report for 1905 1 General William H. Carter, 
commanding the Department of the Philippines which 
included Samar and the rest of the Visayan Islands, 
gives the key to the Commission's twenty-six-day 
stay in his district in the following part of said 
report : 

Within a few days after the rendition of the annual 
report for last year 2 a serious outbreak occurred in the 
Gandara valley, Samar. This was followed by disorders 
in all the other large islands of the department, Negros, Panay, 
Cebu, and Leyte. 

Nowhere in the civil government reports do you 
find the slightest recognition that these disorders had 

1 War Department Report, 1905, vol. iii., p. 285. 

2 Army reports are usually made right after the expiration of the 
American governmental fiscal year, June 30th. 



Governor Wright — 1905 507 

any relation to each other, or to the fundamental prob- 
lem of public order, or any political significance what- 
soever, each being treated as a purely local issue, the 
idea that the circumstance of Samar's having been 
thrown into pandemonium by the successes of the 
enemies of the American Government might have en- 
couraged its enemies in the neighboring islands, never 
seeming to occur to the authors of the said reports. 
General Carter's report goes on to state that within 
five months after the Samar outbreak of July, 1904, 
seven hundred native troops had been put in the field 
in that turbulent island. In December, 1904, troops 
began to be poured into Samar, so that it was not long 
before the seven hundred native troops had become 
seventeen hundred or eighteen hundred, and, says 
General Carter, "in order to free them from garrison 
work in the towns, sixteen companies of the 12th and 
14th Infantry were distributed about the disaffected 
coasts to enable the people who so desired to come from 
their hiding places" — whither they had gone because 
the American flag afforded them no protection — "and 
undertake the rebuilding of their burned homes." 
General Carter avoids touching on the civil gov- 
ernment's (to him well-known) obsession about its 
popularity, a state of mind which could see no 
"political" significance in outbreaks of any kind. 
But he does use this very straightforward language 
about Samar: 

Whatever may have been the original cause of the outbreak, 
it was soon lost sight of when success had drawn a large pro- 
portion of the people away from their homes and fields. * * * 
Except in the largest towns it became simply a question of join- 
ing the Pulajans or being harried by them. In the absence 
of proper protection thousands joined in the movement. 



508 American Occupation of Philippines 

Early in 1905, Hon. George Curry, of New Mexico, 
who was an officer of Colonel Roosevelt's regiment in 
Cuba, and had gone out to the Philippines with a 
volunteer regiment in 1899, remaining with the civil 
Government after 1901, was made Governor of Samar. 
Governor Curry has since been Governor of the Terri- 
tory of New Mexico, and is now (191 2) a member of 
Congress from the recently admitted State of New 
Mexico. Governor Curry has told me since he was 
elected to Congress that it took him all of 1905 and most 
of 1906, aided by several thousand troops, native and 
regular, to put down that Samar outbreak. Yet a 
certificate signed March 28, 1907, by the Governor- 
General and his associates of the Philippine Commission 
states that "a condition of general and complete 
peace" had continued in the Islands for two years 
previous to the date of the certificate. 1 We will come 
to this certificate in its chronological order later. How 
many and what sort of uprisings were blanketed in that 
"forget-it" certificate of 1907 is material to the question 
whether or not the National Administration has ever 
been or is now frank with the country about the uni- 
versality of the desire of the Philippine people for 
independence and local self-government, and perti- 
nent to the insistently recurring query: "Why should 
we make of the Philippines an American Ireland?" 
But inasmuch as, in addition to the Samar uprising 
which raged all through 1905, another insurrection 
occurred in that year, which was duly "forgotten" by 
said certificate, this last movement must now claim 
our attention. 

The provinces which were the theatre of the outbreak 
last above mentioned were all near Manila. They 
were: Cavite, a province of 135,000 people almost at 

1 Report, U. S. Philippine Commission, 1907, pt. 1, p. 47. 



Governor Wright — 1905 509 

the gates of Manila; Batangas, a province of 257,000 
inhabitants adjoining Cavite; and Laguna, a province 
of 150,000 people adjoining both. Some five hundred 
brigands headed by cut -throats claiming to be patriots 
were terrorizing whole districts. Far be it from me to 
lend any countenance to the idea that the leaders of this 
movement, Sakay, Felizardo, Montalon, and the rest 
of their gang, were entitled to any respect. But they 
certainly had a hold on the whole population akin to 
that of Robin Hood, Little John, and Friar Tuck. 
In refusing in 1907 to commute Sakay 's death sentence 
after he was captured, tried, and convicted, Governor- 
General James F. Smith gives some gruesome details 
concerning the performance of that worthy, and his 
followers, yet in dealing with the nature and extent of 
the trouble they gave the Manila government he says 
they " assumed the convenient cloak of patriotism, and 
under the titles of 'Defenders of the Country' and 
1 Protectors of the People' proceeded to inaugurate a 
reign of terror, devastation, and ruin in three of the 
most beautiful provinces in the archipelago. " x 

It has already been made clear that, during the time 
of the insurrection against both the Spaniards and 
Americans, the insurrecto forces were maintained by 
voluntary contributions of the people. Major D. C. 
Shanks, Fourth U. S. Regular Infantry, who was 
Governor of Cavite Province in 1905, after calling 
attention to this fact, adds 2 : 

When the insurrection was over a number of these 
leaders remained out and refused to surrender. Included 
among them were Felizardo and Montalon. The system 

1 See Report, U. S. Philippine Commission, 1907, pt. 1, p. 38. He 
means Cavite, Batangas, and Laguna. 

2 Report, U. S. Philippine Commission, 1905, pt. 1, p. 212. 



510 American Occupation of Philippines 

of voluntary contributions, carried on during the insur- 
recto period, was continued after establishment of civil 
government. 

Again Governor Shanks says, with more of frank- 
ness than diplomacy, considering that he was a provin- 
cial governor under the civil government : 

The establishment of civil government of this province 
was premature and ill-advised. Records show the capture 
or surrender since establishment of civil government of 
nearly 600 hostile firearms. 

One of the causes contributory to the Cavite- Batan- 
gas-Laguna insurrection is stated in the report of the 
Governor- General for 1905 thus: 

In the autumn of 1904 it became necessary to withdraw 
a number of the constabulary from these provinces to 
assist in suppressing disorder which had broken out in the 
province of Samar. l 

Another of the contributory causes is thus stated: 

There was at the time [the fall of 1904] also considerable 
activity among the small group of irreconcilables in Manila, 
who began agitating for immediate independence, doubtless 
because of the supposed effect it would have on the presi- 
dential election in the United States, in which the Philip- 
pines was a large topic of discussion. Evidently this 
was regarded as a favorable time for a demonstration by 
Felizardo, Montalon, De Vega, Oruga, Sakay [etc]. All 
these men had been officers of the Filipino army during the 
insurrection. 

Consider the benevolent casuistry necessary to 
include these fellows, and the tremendous following 
1 Report, U. S. Philippine Commission, 1905, pt. 1, p. 52. 



Governor Wright — 1905 511 

they could get up, and did get up, in Cavite, "the home 
of insurrection," and the adjacent provinces, in a 
certificate to "a condition of general and complete 
peace" alleged in the certificate to have prevailed for 
two years prior to March 28, 1907. To make a long 
story short, on January 31, 1905, a state of insurrection 
was declared to exist, the writ of habeas corpus was 
suspended in Cavite and Batangas, the regular army of 
the United States was ordered out, and reconcent ration 
tactics resorted to, as provided by Section 6 of Act 781 
of the Commission. This is the act already examined 
at length, intended to meet cases of impotency on the 
part of the insular government to protect life and 
property in any other way. Political timidity is con- 
spicuously absent from the resolution of the Philippine 
Commission of January 31, 1905, formally recognizing 
a break in the peerless continuity of the " general and 
complete peace." It is virilely frank, the presidential 
election being then safely over. 1 It concludes by 
authorizing the Governor- General to suspend the writ 
of habeas corpus and declare martial law, "the public 
safety requiring it." Then follows a proclamation of 
the same date and tenor, by the Governor- General. 

It appears from the case cited in the foot-note that 
in the spring of 1905, one, Felix Barcelon, filed in the 
proper court a petition for the writ of habeas corpus, 
alleging that he was one of the reconcentrados corralled 
and "detained and restrained of his liberty at the town 
of Batangas, in the province of Batangas," by one of 
Colonel Baker's constabulary minions down there. 
The writ was denied by the lower court, In one part 
of the opinion of the Supreme Court in the case it is 
stated (p. 116) that the petitioner "has been detained 

1 For a copy of it, see the case of Barcelon vs. Baker, Philippine 
Supreme Court Reports, vol. v., p. 89. 



512 American Occupation of Philippines 

for a long time * * * not for the commission of any 
crime and by due process of law, but apparently for the 
purpose of protecting him. " The opinion of the court, 
delivered by Mr. Justice Johnson, very properly held 
that the detention was lawful under the war power, 
basing its decision on the authority conferred on the 
Governor- General of the Philippines by the Act of 
Congress of July i, 1902, section 5 of which expressly 
authorizes the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus 
"when in cases of rebellion, insurrection, or invasion 
the public safety may require it." A long legal battle 
was fought, the court holding that the Executive 
Department of the Government is the one in which is 
vested the exclusive right to say when "a state of 
rebellion, insurrection, or invasion" exists, and that 
when it so formally declares, that settles the fact that it 
does exist. At page 98 of the volume above cited 1 
the court held, as to the above mentioned resolution of 
the Philippine Commission and the above mentioned 
executive order declaring a state of insurrection in 
Cavite and Batangas : 

The conclusion set forth in the said resolution and the 
said executive order, as to the fact that there existed in the 
provinces of Cavite and Batangas open insurrection against 
the constituted authorities, was a conclusion entirely with- 
in the discretion of the legislative and executive branches 
of the Government, after an investigation of the facts. 

Yet two years later the same "constituted authori- 
ties" certified to the President of the United States, 
in effect, as we shall see, that no open insurrection 
against the constituted authorities had occurred during 
the preceding two years. They do not in their certi- 
ficate ignore Cavite and Batangas. They mention 

1 Volume v., Philippine Reports. 



Governor Wright — 1905 513 

them by name, with a lot of whereases, explaining that 
after all they really believe that the majority of the 
people in the provinces aforesaid were not in sympathy 
with the uprising. However, after they get through 
with their whereases they face the music squarely, and 
certify to "the condition of general and complete 
peace. " Of the "nigger in the woodpile" more anon. 

Governor Wright was not a party to the certificate 
of 1907. He left the Islands on leave November 4, 
1905. A speech made by him prior to his departure, 
as published in a Manila paper, indicates an expectation 
to return. He never did. In 1906 he was demoted 
to be Ambassador to Japan, a place of far less dignity, 
and far less salary, which he resigned after a year or so. 
Vice-Governor Ide acted as Governor- General until 
April 2, 1906, on which date he was formally inaugu- 
rated as Governor- General. 

Just why Governor Wright did not go back to the 
Philippines as Governor, after his visit to the United 
States in 1905-6, does not appear. It would seem al- 
most certain that if Secretary of War Taft had wanted 
President Roosevelt to send him back, he would have 
gone. Mr. Taft never did frankly tell the Filipinos 
until 1907 that they might just as well shut up talking 
about any independence that anybody living might 
hope to see. Governor Wright began to talk that 
way soon after Mr. Taft left the Islands. Possibly 
Governor Wright undeceived them too soon, and there- 
by made the Philippines more of a troublesome issue 
in the presidential campaign of 1904. President 
Roosevelt recognized the sterling worth of the man, by 
inviting him to succeed Mr. Taft as Secretary 
of War in 1908. But President Taft did not invite 
him to continue in that capacity after March 4, 1909. 
Gossip has it that when the incoming President Taft's 
33 



514 American Occupation of Philippines 

letter to the outgoing President Roosevelt's last Secre- 
tary of War, Governor Wright, was handed to the 
addressee, and its conventional "hope to be able to 
avail myself of your services later in some other 
capacity" was read by him, the outgoing official 
quietly remarked: "Well, that is a little more round- 
about than the one Jimmie Garfield 1 got, but it 's a 
dismissal just the same. " 

I have always thought that the reason Governor 
Wright did not go back to the Philippines as Governor 
after 1905 was that he did not continue to "jolly" 
the Filipinos, and abstain from ruthlessly crushing 
their hopes of seeing independence during their life- 
time, as Mr. Taft did continuously during his stay out 
there. The inevitable tendency of the Wright frank 
talk was from the beginning to discredit the Taft 
pleasing and evasive nothings. Also, it was followed, 
as we have seen, by quite a crop of serious disturbances 
of public order, and somebody had to be "the goat." 

1 Mr. Garfield was President Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior. 



CHAPTER XX 
Governor Ide — 1906 

The Tariff is a local issue. 

General W. S. Hancock. 

AFTER Governor Wright left the Islands finally on 
November 4, 1905, Vice-Governor Henry C. 
Ide acted as Governor-General until April 2, 1906, 
when he was duly inaugurated as such. He resigned 
and left the Islands finally in September thereafter. 

All through 1905, Governor Curry, as Governor of 
Samar, which is the third largest island of the archipel- 
ago, wrestled with the Pulajan uprising there, aided, as 
has been stated in the previous chapter, by the native 
troops, scouts, and constabulary, and also by the regular 
army. But at the end of 1905 "the situation" was 
not yet "well in hand. " Since his election to Congress 
in 19 1 2, Governor Curry has told me that in 1905 many 
thousands of people of Samar participated actively as 
part of the enemy's force in the field during that period. 
By the spring of 1906 Governor Curry was getting a grip 
on the situation, and in the latter part of March of that 
year, some of the main outlaw chiefs agreed to surrender 
to him. The report of Colonel Wallace C. Taylor, 
commanding the constabulary of the Third District, 
which included Samar states 1 : "After several weeks 
of negotiating, during which time the camp of the 

1 Report, U. S. Philippine Commission, 1906, pt. 2, p. 255. 

515 



516 American Occupation of Philippines 

Pulahanes was visited by Governor Curry, and the 
Pulahan officers visited the settlement at Magtaon" — 
a settlement in south central Samar — "an understand- 
ing was arrived at by which the Pulahanes were to 
surrender, March 24, 1906. Instead of surrendering 
as agreed, the Pulahanes, commanded by Nasario 
Aguilar, made a treacherous attack on the constabulary 
garrison on the day and hour appointed for the sur- 
render. " The constabulary numbered some fifty men, 
the pulajans about 130. After the pulajans opened 
fire they made a rush on the constabulary and a 
hand-to-hand fight ensued. Colonel Taylor's report 
continues : 

After the first rush the fighting continued fiercely, and 
when the last of the pulahanes disappeared there remained 
but seven enlisted men of the constabulary able to fight. 
Seven more were lying about more or less seriously wounded 
and twenty-two were dead. Captain Jones received a bad 
spear thrust in the chest early in the fight, but fought on, 
regardless. Lieutenant Bowers received a gunshot wound 
through the left arm, which, however, did not put him out 
of the fight. Thirty-five dead pulahanes were found on 
the field and eight more have since been found some dis- 
tance off. The number of wounded who escaped cannot 
be determined. The unarmed Americans present with 
Governor Curry escaped to the river and afterwards 
rejoined Captain Jones who armed them. 

The explanation of this treachery, as given by Gov- 
ernor Curry, is curious and interesting. The outlaws 
had intended in good faith to surrender as a result of 
his negotiation with them, but at the last moment there 
arrived to witness the surrender certain native officials 
and other natives bitterly hated by the Pulajans and 
wholly mistrusted by them. Their arrival caused the 



Governor Ide — 1906 517 

outlaws to suspect treachery themselves and that was 
the cause of their change of plans. It was not until 
the end of the year 1906 that the various energetic 
campaigns which followed the Magtaon incident finally 
began to work more or less complete restoration of 
public order by gradual elimination of the enemy 
through killings, captures, and surrenders. An idea 
of the seriousness and magnitude of these operations 
may be gathered without going into the details, from 
the annual report for 1906 of General Henry T. Allen 
commanding the Philippines Constabulary. This report, 
dated August 31, 1906 x , states: 

At present seventeen companies of scouts and four com- 
panies of American troops under Colonel Smith, 8th U. S. 
Infantry, are operating against the pulahanes, but with 
success that will be largely dependent upon time and 
attrition. 

General Allen adds: "The entire 21st Regiment 
[of Infantry] is also in Samar. " These facts are here 
given because they relate to the period covered by the 
certificate of the Philippine Commission of March 28, 
1907, heretofore alluded to, and which will be more 
fully dealt with hereinafter, which stated that "a con- 
dition of general and complete peace" had prevailed 
throughout the archipelago for two years prior to March 
28, 1907. Without a brief exposition of all these 
matters, it would be impossible to enable the reader to 
feel the pulse of the Filipino people as it stood at the 
time of the election of their assembly in 1907. The 
fact of our having been unable to discontinue Filipino- 
killing altogether for any considerable period from 1899 
to the end of 1906 is too obviously relevant to the state 
of the public mind in 1907 to need elaboration. 

1 See page 227, Report of Philippine Commission, 1906, pt. 2. 



518 American Occupation of Philippines 

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1906 1 
deals at some length with disturbances which occurred 
in the island of Leyte (area 3000 square miles, popula- 
tion nearly 400,000), beginning in the middle of June. 
It describes among other things a visit of Governor- 
General Ide to Tacloban, the capital of Leyte, made in 
consequence of said disturbances, and conferences held 
by him there with Major-General Wood, commanding 
all the United States forces in the Philippines, Brigadier- 
General Lee, commanding the Department of the 
Visayas (which included Leyte, headquarters, Iloilo), 
Colonel Borden, commanding the United States forces 
in the island of Leyte, Colonel Taylor, the chief of the 
constabulary of the District, etc. Certainly from this 
formidable gathering of notables, it is clear that there 
was about to take place in Leyte what our friends of 
the Lambs' Club in New York would call "An all star 
performance." Leyte was four to five hundred miles 
from Manila. Yet so serious was the disturbance that 
the highest military and civil representatives of the 
American Government in the archipelago deemed it 
necessary to meet in the island which was the scene of 
the trouble with a view of handling it. Yet in the 
Report of the Philippine Commission for 1906 one finds 
the usual rotund rhetoric treating the disturbances as of 
no ' ' political ' ' significance — which was only another way 
of claiming that they were not serious. It is difficult 
to handle this aspect of the matter without imputing 
to the civil authorities intent to deceive, but to leave 
such an imputation unremoved would be to miss the 
whole significance of the matter. As has already been 
made clear, when Judge Taft, Judge Ide, and their 
colleagues of the Philippine Commission had left Wash- 
ington for Manila in 1900 Mr. McKinley had assured 

1 Report, Philippine Commission, 1906, pt. 1, p. 37. 



Governor Ide — 1906 519 

them he had no doubt that the better element of the 
Philippine people, once they understood us, would 
welcome our rule. As soon as they set foot in the 
Philippine Islands they had at once begun to act upon 
the theory that there was no real fundamental opposi- 
tion to us on the part of the people of the Philippines 
and had continued obstinately to act upon that theory 
ever since. Certainly the attitude of the civil govern- 
ment toward the disturbances in Leyte in 1906 is not 
surprising when the mind adverts for a moment to the 
panorama of the five more or less sanguinary years 
already fully described hereinbefore and then takes the 
following bird's-eye glance at the official reports for 
those years. 

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1900, 
(page 17) had said: 

A great majority of the people long for peace and are 
entirely willing to accept the establishment of a government 
under the supremacy of the United States. 

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1901 
(page 7) had said: 

The collapse of the insurrection came in May. 

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1902 
(page 3) had said: 

The insurrection as an organized attempt to subvert the 
authority of the United States in these islands is entirely 
at an end, 

referring farther on to "the whole Christian Philip- 
pine . population" as " enjoying civil government. " 
If the "enjoyment" thus described had been genuine, 
continued, profound, and sincere, it would have been 



520 American Occupation of Philippines 

another story. But the net attitude of the civil govern- 
ment toward the general health of the body politic, 
relatively to public order, reminds one of the cheerful 
gentleman who remarked of his invalid friend, "He 
seems to be 'enjoying' poor health/' 

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1903 
(page 25) says: 

The conditions with respect to tranquillity in the islands 
have greatly improved during the last year. 

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1904 
(page 1) says: 

The great mass of the people, however, were domestic 
and peaceable. 

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1905 
(part I, page 59) says: 

On the whole life and property have been as safe as in 
other civilized countries. 

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1906 
(page 40) says : 

Viewing the entire situation the islands are in a peaceable 
and orderly condition aside from 

various disorders which fill some ten pages of the 
report. 

The inflexible attitude of the Commission from the 
beginning, of treating each successive disturbance of 
public order as a purely "local issue," after General 
Hancock's method with the tariff, is thus sufficiently 
apparent. They always refuse to see in successive 
outbreaks in various parts of the Islands any evidence 



Governor Ide — 1906 521 

of general and unanimous lack of appreciation for a 
benign alien civil government. Therefore it was of 
course clearly a foregone conclusion, in 1906, that 
Governor Ide, who had been in the Islands all these 
years, was going to be wholely unable to see anything 
in the disturbances in Leyte in the least tending to 
show that American rule was unpopular. And yet 
it was a matter of common knowledge all over the 
Visayan Islands that Jaime Veyra, then Governor of 
Leyte, elected by the people, was one of the most 
obnoxious anti- Americans in the archipelago. Both 
the army and constabulary were ordered out in Leyte 
and a good deal of fighting occurred before order was 
restored. The report of General Allen, commanding 
the constabulary for that year 1 shows one engagement 
with the outlaws in Leyte participated in by the con- 
stabulary and the 21st Regular Infantry, in which the 
enemy numbered 450 and left forty-nine dead upon the 
field. All this period is covered by the certificate of 
general and complete peace of 1907, in the fall of which 
year a Philippine legislature was elected. And those 
of the membership of that body not in favor of Philip- 
pine independence were almost as few as the Socialist 
party in the American House of Representatives, which, 
I believe, consists of Representative Berger. True, the 
peace certificate does not ignore the Leyte outbreak. 
It " forgets and forgives it, " so to speak, as we shall see. 
Governor Ide left the Islands finally on September 
20, 1906, having resigned. Why he should have re- 
signed, it is difficult to say. Take it all in all, he made 
a splendid Governor- General, and ought to have been 
allowed to remain. He knew the Islands from Alpha to 
Omega and had been there six years. His going out 
of office to make way for still another Governor- 

1 See Report of Philippine Commission, 1906, pt. 2, p. 228. 



522 American Occupation of Philippines 

General was wholly uncalled for. So far as the writer 
is informed, he was, when he left, still blessed with 
good health. He had filled a very considerable place 
in the history of his country most creditably. He had 
drawn up a fine code of laws for the Islands known as 
the Ide code. He had made a great minister of finance, 
successfully performing the perilous task of transferring 
the currency of the country from a silver basis to a 
gold basis, and in so doing had proven himself fully a 
match, in protecting the interests of the Government, 
for the wiley local financiers representing the Hong 
Kong and Shanghai Bank, the chartered bank of 
India, Australia, and China, and other institutions run 
by experienced men of more or less piratical tendencies. 
As Governor-General of the Islands, his justice, firmness, 
and courtliness of manner combined to produce an ad- 
ministration in keeping with the dignity of his great 
office. After returning to the United States, he re- 
mained in private life for a time, and was finally given 
a comparatively unimportant post as minister to a 
second-class country, Spain, which post he still occupies 
(in 1912). 

When, fresh from the memory of the Samar massacres 
of 1904, I landed at Seattle, at the end of my last home- 
ward-bound journey across the Pacific, in April, 1905, 
one of the ' ' natives ' ' of Seattle asked me : " Have those 
people over there ever got quiet yet?" The question 
itself seemed an answer to the orthodox official attitude 
at Manila, which had so long been elaborately denying, 
as to each successive local outbreak, that such outbreak 
bore any relation to the original insurrection, or was 
any wise illustrative of the general state of public 
feeling in the Islands. At the time the question was 
asked, the answer was, "Not entirety." Not until 
toward the end of 1906 did "Yes" become a correct 



Governor Icle — 1906 523 

answer to the question. In other words, there were no 
more serious outbreaks after 1906, nor was a state of 
general and complete peace ever finally established 
until then. Since 1906 there have been occasional 
despatches from Manila recounting small episodes of 
bloodshed, several of which have had quite a martial 
ring. These have related merely to the country of the 
Mohammedan Moros, who are as wholly apart from the 
main problem as the American Indian to-day is from 
our tariff and other like questions. The Moros are 
indeed what Kipling calls "half savage and half child. " 
They never did have anything more to do with the 
Filipino insurrection against us than the American 
Indian had to do with the Civil War. 



CHAPTER XXI 
Governor Smith — 1907-9 

Oh, but Honey, dis rabbit dess 'bleeged ter climb dis tree. 

Uncle Remus. 

ON September 20, 1906," says the Report of the 
Philippine Commission for 1907, * " the resigna- 
tion of the Hon. Henry Clay Ide as Governor-General 
became effective, and on that date the Hon. James 
F. Smith was inaugurated as Governor- General of the 
Philippine Islands." 

The year 1907 will be known most prominently to 
the future history of our Far Eastern possession as the 
year of the opening of the Philippine Assembly, which 
momentous event occurred on October 1 6th. But in the 
departments both of Politics and Psychology it should 
be known as the year of the Great Certificate. The 
Great Certificate was a certificate signed by certain 
eminent gentlemen on March 28, 1907, which made the 
preposterous affirmation that a condition of general and 
complete peace had prevailed throughout the archipelago, 
except among the non-Christian tribes, for the two years 
immediately preceding. Taken in its historic setting, 
that certificate can by no possibility escape responsi- 
bility, as ''accessory after the fact" at least, to the 
pretence that a similar condition had prevailed ever 

*Pt. 1, p. 36. 

524 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 525 

since President Roosevelt's final war- whoop of July 4, 
1902, published to the American troops in the Islands 
on the day named. That war-whoop, it will be remem- 
bered, was in the form of a presidential proclama- 
tion congratulating General Chaffee and "the gallant 
officers and men under his command" on some "two 
thousand combats, great and small," and declaring, 
in effect, that Benevolent Assimilation was at last 
triumphantly vindicated, and that opposition to Ameri- 
can rule was at an end. The certificate of March 28, 
1907, appears at pages 47-8 of the Report of the Philip- 
pine Commission for igoy, part 1. If we consider what 
is now going on in the Islands as "modern" history, 
and the days of the early fighting as "ancient" history, 
this certificate will serve as the connecting link between 
the two. It furnishes the key-note to all that had 
happened during the American occupation prior to 
1907, and the key-note of all that has happened since. 
Therefore, though somewhat long, it is deemed indis- 
pensable to clearness to submit here in full the text of 

THE GREAT CERTIFICATE OF I907 

Whereas the census of the Philippine Islands was com- 
pleted and published on the twenty-seventh day of March, 
nineteen hundred and five, which said completion and publi- 
cation of said census was, on the twenty-eighth day of 
March, nineteen hundred and five, duly published and 
proclaimed to the people by the governor-general of the 
Philippine Islands with the announcement that the Presi- 
dent of the United States would direct the Philippine Com- 
mission to call a general election for the choice of delegates 
to a popular assembly, provided that a condition of general 
and complete peace with recognition of the authority of the 
United States should be certified by the Philippine Commission 
to have continued in the territory of the Philippine Islands for 



526 American Occupation of Philippines 

a period of two years after said completion and publication 
of said census; and 

Whereas since the completion and publication of said 
census there have been no serious disturbances of the public 
order save and except those caused by the noted outlaws 
and bandit chieftains, Felizardo and Montalon, and their 
followers in the provinces of Cavite and Batangas, and those 
caused in the provinces of Samar and Leyte by the non- 
Christian and fanatical pulahanes resident in the mountain 
districts of the said provinces and the barrios contiguous 
thereto; and 

Whereas the overwhelming majority of the people of 
said provinces of Cavite, Batangas, Samar, and Leyte 
have not taken part in said disturbances and have not 
aided or abetted the lawless acts of said bandits and 
pulahanes; and 

Whereas the great mass and body of the Filipino people 
have, during said period of two years, continued to be law- 
abiding, peaceful, and loyal to the United States, and have 
continued to recognize and do now recognize the authority 
and sovereignty of the United States in the territory of said 
Philippine Islands: Now, therefore, be it 

Resolved by the Philippine Commission in formal session 
duly assembled, That it, said Philippine Commission, do 
certify, and it does hereby certify, to the President of the 
United States that for a period of two years after the completion 
and publication of the census a condition of general and com- 
plete peace, with recognition of the authority of the United 
States, has continued to exist and now exists in the territory 
of said Philippine Islands not inhabited by Moros or 
other non-Christian tribes; and be it further 

Resolved by said Philippine Commission, That the Presi- 
dent of the United States be requested, and is hereby 
requested, to direct said Philippine Commission to call a 
general election for the choice of delegates to a popular 
assembly of the people of said territory in the Philippine 
Islands, which assembly shall be known as the Philippine 
Assembly. 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 527 

Let us examine these amiable liberties thus taken with 
the facts of history by men of irreproachable private 
character, briefly analyzing their action. Such an 
examination and analysis are indispensable to a clear 
understanding by a great free people whose proudest 
boast is love of fair play, of whether the Filipino people, 
or any appreciable fraction of them, have ever in the 
least consented, or do now in the least consent, to our 
rule, as the small minority among us interested in 
keeping the Islands, have systematically sought, all 
these years, to have this nation believe. As the above 
certificate of 1907 was the last hurdle that Benevolent 
Assimilation had to leap on the Benevolent Hypoc- 
risy course over which we had to gallop in order to 
get from the freeing of Cuba to the subjugation of 
the Philippines, let us glance back for a moment at 
the first hurdle or two, leapt when Mr. Taft was in the 
Philippine saddle. 

Judge Taft had said on November 30, 1900: 

A great majority of the people long for peace and are 
entirely willing to accept the establishment of a government 
under the supremacy of the United States 1 ; 

and, pursuant to that idea, he had set up his civil 
government on July 4, 1901. He never did thereafter 
admit that he was mistaken in his original theory, but 
kept on trying to fit the facts to his theory, hoping that 
after a while they would fit. He "clung to his policy 
of disinterested benevolence with a tenacity born of 
conviction, " to borrow a phrase from Governor-General 
Smith's inaugural address of 1907. But in this same 
inaugural address of Governor Smith of 1907, you find, 
for the first time in all the Philippine state papers, a 
1 Report of Taft Philippine Commission for igoo, p. 1 7. 



528 American Occupation of Philippines 

frank admission of the actual conditions under which 
the civil government of 1901 was in fact set up. Says 
he: 

While the smoke of battle still hung over the hills and 
valleys of the Philippines and every town and barrio in the 
islands was smoking hot with rebellion, she [the United 
States] replaced the military with a civil regime and on 
the smouldering embers of insurrection planted civil 
government. x 

That confession, made with the bluntness of a most 
gallant soldier, is as refreshing in its honesty as the 
Roosevelt war-whoop of 1902. There shall be no 
tiresome repetition here concerning the original with- 
holding of the facts from the American people in 1898- 
9, but to place in juxtaposition Secretary of War Root's 
representations to the American public in the year last 
named, and the actual facts as stated earlier in the same 
year by General Mac Arthur, one of our best fighting 
generals, during the thick of the early fighting, in an 
interview already noticed in its proper chronological 
place, will forever fix the genesis of the original lack of 
frankness as to conditions in the Philippines which has 
naturally and inexorably made frankness as to those 
conditions impossible ever since. As late as October 
7, 1899, Mr. Root — who had not then and has not since 
been in the Philippines — had said in Chicago, in a 
speech at a dinner of the Marquette Club : 

Well, against whom are we fighting? Are we fighting 
the Philippine nation? No. There is none. There are 
hundreds of islands, inhabited by more than sixty tribes, 
speaking more than sixty different languages, and all but 
one are ready to accept American sovereignty. 

1 See Report of U. S. Philippine Commission, 1907, pt. 1, p. 229. 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 529 

As early as the beginning of April, 1899, just after 
the taking on March 31st of the first insurgent capital, 
Malolos, General Mac Arthur, who commanded our 
troops in the assault on that place, had said, in an 
interview with a newspaper man afterwards verified 
by the General before the Senate Committee of 1902 
as substantially correct: 

When I first started in against these rebels, I believed that 
Aguinaldo's troops represented only a faction. * * * / did 
not like to believe that the whole population of Luzon * * * 
was opposed to us * * *. But after having come thus 
far, and having been brought much in contact with both 
insurrectos and amigos, 1 I have been reluctantly compelled 
to believe that the Filipino masses are loyal to Aguinaldo and 
the government which he heads. 2 

The presidential election of 1900 had been fought 
out, in the midst of considerable bitterness, on the idea 
that the Root view was correct and the Mac Arthur 
view was altogether mistaken. So that after 1900, the 
McKinley Administration was irrevocably committed 
to the Root view. 3 The Philippine Government had, 
after 1900, diligently set to work to live up to the Root 
view, and to fit the facts to the Root view by prayer 
and hope, accompanied by asseveration. Hence in 
1 90 1 the alleged joyous sobs of welcome with which the 
Filipino people are, in effect, described in the report 

1 Amiga, in Spanish, means friend. Every non-combatant Filipino 
with whom our people came in contact in the early days always claimed 
to be an "amigo, " and never was, in any single instance. 

2 See testimony of General MacArthur before the Senate Committee 
of 1902, Senate Document 331, 1902, p. 1942. 

s The adverse minority report on the pending Jones bill, which bill 
proposes ultimate Philippine independence in 1921, is full of the old 
insufferable drivel about "tribes, " and of the rest of the Root views of 
1900. 

34 



530 American Occupation of Philippines 

of the Philippine Commission for that year as having 
received the "benign" civil government, said sobs or 
other manifestations having spread, if the Commission's 
report is to be taken at its face value, "like wild-fire." 
Hence also the attempt of 1902 to minimize the insur- 
surrection of 190 1-2, in Batangas and other provinces 
of southern Luzon, conducted by what Governor 
Luke E. Wright, in a speech delivered at Memphis in 
the latter part of 1902, called "the die-in-the-last-ditch 
contingent. " Hence the quiet placing of the province 
of Surigao in the hands of the military in 1903 without 
suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and the failure 
to order out the army in Albay in 1903 and in Samar in 
1 904. Hence also the prompt use of the army in Samar, 
Batangas, and Cavite in 1905, after the presidential 
election was safely over. Hence also the seething 
state of sedition which smouldered in the Visayan 
Islands in 1906, punctuated by the outbreak in Leyte 
of that year. 

The psychologic processes by which the distinguished 
gentlemen who signed the Great Certificate of March 
28, 1907, got their own consent to sign it make the most 
profoundly interesting study, relatively to the general 
welfare of the world, in all our Philippine experiments so 
far. They are the final flowering of the plant Political 
Expediency. They are the weeds of benevolent 
casuistry that become from time to time unavoidable 
in a colonial garden tended by a republic based on the 
consent of the governed and therefore by the law of its 
own life unfitted to run any other kind of a government 
frankly. These processes find their origin in the 
provisions of the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, known 
as the Philippine Government Act. Three days after 
President Roosevelt approved the Act, he issued his 
proclamation of July 4, 1902, above noticed, declaring 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 53 J 

the insurrection at an end. Section 6 of that Act 
provided : 

Whenever the existing insurrection in the Philippine 
Islands shall have ceased, and a condition of general and 
complete peace shall have been established therein, and the 
fact shall be certified to the President by the Philippine 
Commission, the President, upon being satisfied thereof, 
shall order a census of the Philippine Islands to be taken 
by said Philippine Commission. 

This census was intended to be preliminary to grant- 
ing the Filipinos a legislature of their own, but as a 
legislature full of insurrectos would of course stultify its 
American sponsors before all mankind, it was announced 
in effect, in publishing the census programme, that no 
legislature would be forthcoming if the Filipinos did 
not quit insurrecting, and remain "good" for two years. 
If they did remain good for two years after the census 
was finished, then they should have their legislature. 
During the lull of " general and complete' ' peace which, 
in the fall of 1902, followed the suppression of the Batan- 
gas insurrection of 190 1-2, and preceded the Ola 
insurrection of 1902-3 in the hemp provinces of southern 
Luzon, the Commission made, on September 25, 1902, 
the certificate contemplated by the above Act of Con- 
gress, and the taking of the census was accordingly 
ordered by the President of the United States, 
Mr. Roosevelt, by a proclamation issued the same 
day. 1 Section 7 of the aforesaid Act of Congress 
provided : 

Two years after the completion and publication of the 
census, in case such condition of general and complete peace 
with recognition of the authority of the United States 

1 See Report of U. S. Philippine Commission, 1907, pt» 1, p. 211. 



532 American Occupation of Philippines 

shall have continued in the territory of said islands not 
inhabited by Moros or other non- Christian tribes, and such 
facts shall have been certified to the President by the Philip- 
pine Commission, the President upon being satisfied thereof 
shall direct said Commission to call, and the Commission 
shall call, a general election for the choice of delegates to a 
popular assembly of the people of said territory in the 
Philippine Islands, which shall be known as the Philippine 
Assembly. 

On March 27, 1905, the President of the United States 
was duly advised that the census had been completed, 
and on March 28th, the presidential proclamation 
promising the Filipinos a legislature two years later if in 
the meantime they did not insurrect any, was duly 
published at Manila. It is true that there is no Philip- 
pine state paper signed by anybody, either by the 
President of the United States, or the Governor- General 
of the Philippines, or any one else, certifying to a condi- 
tion of "general and complete peace" between the 
certificate to that effect made by the Philippine Com- 
mission on September 25, 1902, above mentioned, 
which authorized commencing the census (and was 
justified by the facts) , and the presidential promise of 
March 28, 1905, that if they would "be good" for two 
years more, they should have a legislature. But the 
whole manifest implication of the representations of 
fact sought to be conveyed by the action both of the 
Washington and the Manila authorities at the date of 
the presidential promise of March 28, 1905, is that a 
condition of general and complete peace had obtained 
ever since the last certificate to that effect, the certifi- 
cate of September 25, 1902. Yet, as we saw in the 
chapter covering the last year of Governor Wright's 
administration, besides the Samar disturbances that 
lasted all through 1905, a big insurrection was actually 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 533 

in full swing in Cavite, Batangas, and Laguna provinces, 
on March 28, 1905, had then been in progress since 
before the first of the year, and continued until the 
latter part of 1905, the then Governor-General, Gov- 
ernor Wright, having, by proclamation issued January 
31, 1905, declared Cavite and Batangas to be in a state 
of insurrection, ordered the military into those prov- 
inces, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Presi- 
dent Roosevelt's proclamation of March 28, 1905, can 
by no possibility be construed as saying to the Filipinos 
anything other than substantially this: "You have 
not insurrected any since my proclamation of July 4, 
1902. If you will be good two years more, you shall 
have a legislature." What then was the Philippine 
Commission to do at the end of those two years, pep- 
pered, as they had been, with most annoying outbreaks 
in various provinces not inhabited by "Moros or other 
non-Christian tribes." During the presidential cam- 
paign of 1904 the Commission had committed them- 
selves, as we have seen, to the proposition that nothing 
serious was going on at that time in Samar. So how 
could they take frank official cognizance on paper of 
the reign of terror let loose there by their delay in 
ordering out the army until after the presidential 
election, a delay which, like a delay of fire-engines to 
arrive at the scene of a fire, had permitted the Samar 
outbreak to gain such headway that it took two years 
to finally put it down? Then there was the outbreak 
of 1906 in Leyte, described in the last chapter, as to 
which even the Commission had admitted in their 
annual report for that year J : 

Possibly its [Leyte's] immediate vicinity to Samar has 
had to do with the disturbed conditions. 

1 Part 1, p. 38. 



534 American Occupation of Philippines 

In other words, possibly, a fire may spread from one 
field of dry grass to another near by. 

As to the Cavite-Batangas-Laguna insurrection of 
1905, in an executive order dated September 28, 1907, x 
— noticed in a previous chapter, but too pertinent to 
be entirely omitted here — wherein are set forth the 
reasons for withholding executive clemency from the 
condemned leaders of that movement, Governor- 
General Smith describes in harrowing terms "a reign 
of terror, devastation, and ruin in three of the most 
beautiful provinces in the archipelago," wrought by the 
condemned men, who he says "assumed the cloak of 
patriotism, and under the titles of 'Defenders of the 
Country,' and 'Protectors of the People' proceeded to 
inaugurate " said reign of terror. These men were most 
of them former insurgent officers who had remained 
out after the respectable generals had all surrendered. 
This Cavite-Batangas-Laguna insurrection was the very 
sort of thing which the conditional promise of a legislature 
made by Congress to the Filipino people in Sections 6 and 
7 of the Act of July 1, 1902 — the Philippine Government 
Act — had stipulated should not happen. This is no 
mere dictum of my own. In the case of Barcelon against 
Baker, 5 Philippine Reports, pp. 87 et sea., already very 
briefly noticed in a previous chapter, the Supreme Court 
of the Islands had, in effect, so held. Section 5 of the 
Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, had provided that if 
any state of affairs serious enough should arise, the 
Governor of the Philippines should have authority to 
suspend the writ of habeas corpus "when in cases of 
rebellion, insurrection, or invasion the public safety 
may require it." Sections 6 and 7 of the same Act 
had provided, on the other hand, that if a condition of 
general and complete peace should prevail for a stated 

1 Report of Philippine Commission, 1907, pt. 1, p. 37. 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 535 

period the Filipinos should have a legislature. In the 
case of Barcelon against Baker the Supreme Court held 
that the situation contemplated by Section 5 of the Act 
of Congress had arisen in the provinces of Cavite and 
Batangas. That, of course, automatically, so to speak, 
made the postponement of the Philippine Assembly a 
necessary logical sequence, under the provisions of 
Sections 6 and 7. These Sections 6 and 7 promised the 
Filipinos a legislature in the event the conditions con- 
templated by Section 5 should not arise. Barcelon, 
who was one of the (non-combatant) reconcentrados 
restrained of his liberty at Batangas, claimed that his 
detention as such reconcentrado by the defendant in 
the habeas corpus proceeding, the constabulary officer, 
Colonel Baker, was unlawful, in that, he being charged 
with no crime, such detention deprived him of his 
liberty without due process of law. The Philippine 
Commission, however, had declared, by virtue of the au- 
thority vested in it by Section 5 of the Act of Congress 
aforesaid, that a state of insurrection existed in Cavite 
and Batangas, and accordingly the Governor-General 
had suspended the writ of habeas corpus and declared 
martial law in those provinces. The Attorney- General 
representing the Philippine Commission before the 
court rested the Government's case on the proposition 
that the petitioner was not entitled to claim the ordi- 
nary "due process of law" because "open insurrection 
against the constituted authorities" existed in the 
provinces named. And the Supreme Court upheld 
his contention. In so holding, they say, among other 
things (page 93), in construing Section 5 of the Act of 
Congress we are considering: 

Inasmuch as the President, or Governor-General with 
the approval of the Philippine Commission, can suspend the 



536 American Occupation of Philippines 

privilege of the writ of habeas corpus only under the condi- 
tions mentioned in the said statute, it becomes their duty 
to make an investigation of the existing conditions in the 
archipelago, or any part thereof, to ascertain whether there 
actually exists a state of rebellion, insurrection, or invasion, 
and that the public safety requires the suspension of the 
privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. When this investi- 
gation is concluded, and the President, or the Governor- 
General with the consent of the Philippine Commission, 
declares that there exists these conditions, and that the public 
safety requires the suspension of the privilege of the writ of 
habeas corpus, can the judicial department of the Govern- 
ment investigate the same facts and declare that no such 
conditions exist? 

They answer "No!" The head note of the decision 
is as follows: 

The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus may be sus- 
pended in the Philippine Islands in the case of rebellion, 
insurrection, and invasion, when the public safety requires 
it, by the President of the United States, or by the Gov- 
ernor-General of the Philippine Islands with the approval 
of the Philippine Commission. 

Thus the Supreme Court of the Islands squarely held 
that on the fourth day of August, iqo$ (the day the 
writ of habeas corpus was made returnable), open 
insurrection existed against the constituted authorities in 
the Islands, in the provinces named, and had existed since 
the Executive Proclamation of January Jist, previous, 
declaring a state of insurrection, and on that ground 
denied the writ. Yet the Commission certified on 
March 28, 1907, that a state of general and complete 
peace as contemplated by the Act of Congress condi- 
tionally promising a legislature, had prevailed for the 
two years preceding. In other words the Philippine 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 537 

Commission declared a state of insurrection to exist in 
certain populous provinces, and was upheld by the 
Supreme Court of the Islands in so doing, and later 
certified to the continuance of a state of general and 
complete peace covering the same period. 

All the uncandid things — uncandid in failure to take 
the American people into their confidence — that have 
been done by all the good men we have sent to the 
Philippines from the beginning, have been justified by 
those good men to their own consciences on the idea 
that, because the end in view was truly benevolent, 
therefore the end justified the means. As a matter of 
fact, American Benevolent Assimilation in the Philip- 
pines has, in its practical operation, worked more of 
misery and havoc, first through war, and since through 
legislation put or kept on the statute books by the 
influence of special interests in the United States with 
Congress, " than any which has darkened their unhappy 
past" to use one of Mr. McKinley's early expressions 
deprecating doing for the Philippines what we did for 
Cuba. J 

But let us see just how much the Philippine Commis- 
sion that signed the peace certificate of March 28, 1907, 
swallowed, and how they swallowed it. It will be 
observed that they sugar-coated their certificate with a 
lot of whereases. The first of these recites President 
Roosevelt's promise of March 28, 1905, that the Fili- 
pinos should have a legislature two years thereafter 
''provided that a condition of general and complete 
peace with recognition of the authority of the United 
States should be certified by the Philippine Commission 
to have continued in the territory of the Philippine 
Islands for a period of two years" after the pro- 

1 See President McKinley's annual message to Congress of December, 
1899, Congressional Record, December 5, 1899, p. 34. 



53 8 American Occupation of Philippines 

clamation. Whereas number two, it will be noted, 
goes on to state that there have been "no serious dis- 
turbances of public order save and except" those in 
Cavite, Batangas, Samar, and Leyte, 1 the magnitude 
of which has been fully described in previous chapters. 
Of the Cavite-B at angas insurrection, the only one they 
had previously formally admitted to be an insurrection, 
they say it was "caused by certain noted outlaws and 
bandit chieftains [naming them], and their followers." 
Obviously this was hardly sufficient to show that an 
insurrection they had once officially recognized as 
such was not in fact such at all. So in order to justify 
a statement that ' ' a condition of general and complete 
peace" had continued in these two great provinces of 
Cavite and Batangas, which they had but shortly 
previously declared to be in a state of insurrection, 
and been upheld by the Supreme Court in so doing, 
they resort to the old Otis expedient of 1898-9, worked 
on the American people through Mr. McKinley to 
show absence of lack of consent-of-the-governed. This 
expedient, as we have seen in the earlier chapters of 
this book, consisted in vague use of the word "ma- 
jority. " It had stood Judge Taft in good stead in the 
campaign of 1900, because when he then said that 
"the great majority of the people" were "entirely 
willing" to accept American rule, there was no earthly 
way to disprove it in time for the verdict of the Ameri- 
can people to be influenced by the unanimity of the 
Filipinos against a change of masters in lieu of inde- 
pendence. It was the only possible expedient for an 
American conscience, because every American naturally 
feels that unless he can, by some sort of sophistry, 
persuade himself that "the majority" of the people 
want a given thing, then the thing is a wrong thing to 

1 Provinces totalling about a million people. 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 539 

force upon them. So the ethical hurdle the Commis- 
sion had to leap in order to sign the certificate of 1907 
was cleared thus: 

The overwhelming majority of the people of said prov- 
inces have not taken part in said disturbances and have 
not aided and abetted the lawless acts of said bandits. 

As a matter of fact, the report of the American 
Governor of Cavite — and conditions were conceded 
to be identical in the two provinces of Cavite and 
Batangas — shows that the reason it was so hard to 
suppress the Cavite-Batangas troubles of 1905 was that 
the people would not help the authorities to apprehend 
the outlaws. No doubt the King of England would 
have signed a similar certificate as to the people of the 
shires and counties in which Robin Hood, Little John, 
and Friar Tuck, held high carnival. Of course I do 
not mean to libel the fair fame of that fine freebooter 
Robin Hood and his companions by placing the ras- 
cally leaders of the bands of outlaws now under con- 
sideration in the same jolly and respectable class with 
those beloved friends of the childhood of us all. But 
the Cavite-Batangas " patriots" of 1905 could never 
have given the authorities as much trouble as they did 
if the people had not at least taken secret joy in dis- 
comfiture of the American authorities. Until finally 
suppressed, all such movements as these always grew 
exactly as a snow-ball does if you roll it on snow. Says 
Governor Shanks, a Major of the 4th United States 
Infantry, who was Governor of Cavite, in 1905 in his 
report for that year, * in explaining the uprising under 
consideration, and the way it grew: "The Filipino 
likes to be on the winning side." Certainly this 

1 Report of U. S. Philippine Commission, 1905, pt. 1, p. 211. 



54° American Occupation of Philippines 

is not peculiar to the Filipino. Governor Shanks 
proceeds : 

The prestige acquired (by the uprising) at San Pedro 
Tunasan, Paranaque, Taal, and San Francisco de Malabon 
had great weight in creating active sympathy for ladrone 
bands and leaders. Something was needed to counter- 
balance the effect of their combined successes, and the 
appearance of regular troops was just the thing needed. 

This explains how "the overwhelming majority" of 
which the certificate of 1907 speaks was obtained in 
Cavite. It took six months to obtain said " majority " 
at that. I suppose the campaigning of the American 
regulars might be credited with obtaining the "major- 
ity, " and the reconcentration of brother Baker of the 
constabulary might be accorded the additional credit 
of making the majority "overwhelming." If you 
have, as election tellers, so to speak, a soldier with a 
bayonet on one side, and a constabulary officer with a 
reconcentration camp back of him on the other, you can 
get an "overwhelming majority" for the continuance of 
American rule even in Cavite province. 

Through men I commanded during the early cam- 
paigning, I have killed my share of Filipinos in the time 
of war ; and after the civil government was set up I had 
occasion to hang a good many of them, under what 
seemed to me a necessary application of the old Mosaic 
law, "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life 
for a life. " But I thank God I have never been a party 
to the insufferable pretence that they, or any appre- 
ciable fraction of them, ever consented to our rule. 
This, however, is the whole theory of the Philippine 
Commission's certificate of March 28, 1907. It is 
curious how generously and supremely frank a brave 
soldier will get when he forgets to be a politician. In 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 541 

one of his state papers of 1907 Governor-General Smith t 
speaks of General Trias, who had been Lieu tenant- 
General of the insurgent army in the days of the 
insurrection, and next in rank to Aguinaldo himself, 
as one "whose love of country had been tested on many 
a well fought field of honorable conflict. " Contrast 
this tribute to the respectability of the original Philip- 
pine war for independence against us with the long list 
of stale falsehoods already reviewed in this volume, 
on the faith of which, in the presidential campaign 
of 1900, the American people were persuaded that to 
deny to the Filipinos what they had accorded to Cuba 
was righteous! The leaders of the Cavite-Batangas 
uprising of 1905 had been officers of the insurgent 
army, and that was the secret of their hold upon the 
people of those provinces. It is true that they must 
have been pretty sorry officers, and that they were 
ladrones (brigands) . They were cruel and unmitigated 
scoundrels working for purely selfish and vainglorious 
ends. But it was the cloak of patriotism, however, 
infamously misused, that gained them such success 
as they attained in 1905. Says the American Governor 
of Cavite province in his annual report for 1906 2 : 

The province should be most carefully watched. I am 
convinced that ladrone leaders do not produce conditions, 
but that the conditions and attitude of the public produce 
ladrones. 

So much for the Cavite-Batangas hurdle. And now 
as to the Samar and Leyte hurdle. 

The signers of the certificate of 1907 justify their 
certificate as to Samar and Leyte on a very ingenious 
theory. The Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, already 

1 Report of Philippine Commission, 1907, pt. 1, p. 38. 

2 Ibid., 1906, pt. 1, p. 225. 



54 2 American Occupation of Philippines 

cited, which had provided for the taking of a census 
preliminary to the call of an election for delegates to a 
legislature, had recognized the crude ethnological 
status of the Moros and other non-Christian tribes. 
These had never had anything whatever to do with 
the insurrection against us. Therefore in making the 
continuance of a state of general and complete peace 
for a prescribed period a condition precedent to grant- 
ing the Filipinos a legislature, the Act of 1902 had 
limited that condition precedent to "the territory of 
said Islands not inhabited by Moros or other non- 
Christian tribes." In fact President Roosevelt's proc- 
lamation of September 25, 1902, already noticed, 
ordering the taking of the census on the theory that a 
state of general and complete peace then existed, 
explains that this theory is entirely consistent with 
trouble among the Moros and other non-Christian 
tribes because they, it says, quoting from a statement 
of the Philippine Commission previously made to the 
President, "never have taken any part in the insur- 
rection. " The Moros and other non-Christian tribes 
were, so to speak, in no sense assets of the Philippine 
insurrection. All the rest of the population was — 
that is, if there was anything in the veteran General 
MacArthur's grim jest of 1900, prompted by Governor 
Taft's half-baked opinion to the contrary, that "ethno- 
logical homogeneity" was the secret of the unanimity 
of the opposition we met, and that somehow people 
11 will stick to their own kith and kin." When the 
Philippine Government Act of 1902 was drawn nobody 
pretended for a moment that there were any non- 
Christian tribes either in Samar or Leyte. The whole 
population of those Islands were valuable assets of the 
insurrection. If any one doubts it, let him ask the 
9th Infantry. You will find in the Census of 1903 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 543 

that there are no non-Christian tribes credited either 
to Samar or Leyte. l When the Philippine Government 
Act of 1902 was drafted, the exception about Moros 
and other non-Christian tribes was intended to except 
merely certain types of people as distinct from the 
great mass of the Philippine population as islands are 
from the sea. The fact is, no person connected with 
the Philippine Government either before or after the 
certificate under consideration, ever thought of classi- 
fying the ignorant country people of the uplands and 
hills of Samar or Leyte, as "non- Christian tribes." 
The Philippine Census of 1903 does not so classify 
them. The very volume of the Report of the Philip- 
pine Commission for 190J in which the certificate 
aforesaid appears, does not. In that volume, 2 the 
report of the Executive Secretary deals elaborately 
with the subject of non-Christian tribes. Professor 
Worcester of the Philippine Commission has for the last 
twelve years been the grand official digger-up of non- 
Christian tribes. He takes as much delight at the 
discovery of a new non-Christian tribe in some remote, 
newly penetrated mountain fastness, as the butterfly 
catcher with the proverbial blue goggles does in the 
capture of a new kind of butterfly. The Executive 
Secretary's report, out of deference to the professor, 
omits no single achievement of his with reference to 
his anthropological hobby. It treats, with an enthu- 
siasm that would delight Mrs. Jellyby herself, of "the 
progress that was made during the fiscal year in 
the work of civilizing non-Christian tribes scattered 

x To be absolutely accurate, there are 688 people classified as " wild" 
in the Census figures as to Samar, and 265,549 are put down as civil- 
ized; the total of population being 266,237. All the 388,922 people 
of Leyte are put down as civilized. See Philippine Census, Table of 
Population, vol. ii., p. 123. 

2 Report of Philippine Commission for 1907, pt. 1, p. 195. 



544 American Occupation of Philippines 

throughout the archipelago. " It gives an alphabetical 
list of all the provinces where there are non-Christian 
tribes, and, under the name of each province it gives 
notes as to the progress during the year with those 
tribes. Neither Samar nor Leyte appear in that list of 
provinces. So that the Samar "Pulajans," or "Red 
Breeches" fellows, — "fanatical" Pulajans, they are 
called in the certificate — were " non- Christian tribes" 
for peace certificate purposes only. One thing which 
makes it most difficult of all for me to understand how 
these gentlemen got their consent to sign that certificate 
is that each non-Christian tribe in the Philippines has 
a language of its own, whereas the country people of 
the uplands and mountains of Samar and Leyte who 
are labelled — or libelled — "non- Christian tribes" in 
the certificate of 1907, were no more different from the 
rest of the population of those islands than, for in- 
stance, the ignorant mountain people of Virginia or 
Kentucky are different, ethnologically, from the inhabi- 
tants of Richmond or Louisville. In his report for 
1908, 1 Governor- General Smith himself makes this 
perfectly clear, where he describes the Samar Pulajan, 
or mountaineer, thus: 

The Pulajan is not a robber or a thief by nature — quite 
the contrary. He is hard working, industrious, and even 
frugal. He had his little late 2 of hemp on the side of the 
mountain, and breaking out his picul 2, of hemp, he carried 
it hank by hank for miles and miles over almost impassable 
mountain trails to the nearest town or barrio. There he 
offered it for sale, and if he refused the price tendered, 

1 See Report of Philippine Commission, 1908, pt. i, p. 62. 

3 Tract. You speak of the small farmer's "late of hemp" in the 
Philippines as you do of his "patch of cotton" in the United States. 

3 A picul is a bale of a given quantity — weight. "Breaking out a 
picul of hemp" is analogous, colloquially, to "picking a bale of cotton." 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 545 

which was generally not more than half the value, he soon 
found himself arrested on a trumped-up charge, and unless 
he compromised by parting with his hemp he found him- 
self, after paying his fine and lawyer's fees, without either 
hemp or money. 

The non-Christian tribes, on the other hand, never 
have anything to do with the civilized people. The 
Act of Congress of 1902, therefore, had no sort of 
reference to the simple, ignorant, and ordinarily docile 
mountain folk who tilled the soil, revered the priests, 
paid their cedula or head tax like all the rest of the popu- 
lation of the Islands, and carried their agricultural 
products from season to season, their hemp and the 
like, to the coast towns to market. In other words, 
inclusion of theSamar "Pulajans," or "Red Breeches" 
brigade, and the Leyte bandits, in the peace certificate 
of 1907, as "non-Christian tribes" was an after- 
thought, having no foundation either in logic or fact. 
It was a part of Benevolent Assimilation. This is 
clearly apparent from President Roosevelt's message 
to Congress of December, 1905. x You do not find any 
buncombe about " non- Christian tribes" in that mes- 
sage. In there reviewing the Samar and other insur- 
rections of 1905 in the Philippines, you find him dealing 
with the real root of the evil with perfect honesty, 
though adopting the view that the Filipino people were 
to blame therefor, because we had placed too much 
power in the hands of an ignorant electorate, which had 
elected rascally officials. "Cavite and Samar," he 
says, "are instances of reposing too much confidence 
in the self-governing power of a people." If we had 
let the Filipinos go ahead with their little republic in 
1898, instead of destroying it as we did, they knew and 

1 See Congressional Record, December 5, 1905, p. 103. 

35 



54 6 American Occupation of Philippines 

would have utilized the true elements of strength they 
had, viz., a very considerable body of educated, patri- 
otic men having the loyal confidence of the masses of 
the people. But we proceeded to ram down their 
throats a preconceived theory that the only road to 
self-government was for an alien people to step in and 
make the ignorant masses the sine qua non. Yet if 
there was one point on which Mr. McKinley had laid 
more stress than on any other, in his original instructions 
of April 7, 1900, to the Taft Commission, that point 
was the one consecrated in the following language of 
those instructions: 

In all the forms of government and administrative 
provisions which they are authorized to prescribe, the 
commission should bear in mind that the government which 
they are establishing is designed not for * * * the expression 
of our theoretical views, etc. 

Of course the ignorant electorate we perpetrated on 
Samar as an "expression of our theoretical views" 
proved that we had "gone too fast" in conferring self- 
government, or, to quote Mr. Roosevelt, had been 
"reposing too much confidence in the self-governing 
power of a people, " if to begin with the rankest material 
for constructing a government that there was at hand 
was to offer a fair test of capacity for self-government. 
But President Roosevelt's message, above quoted, 
shows you that the "ignorant electorate" was merely 
an ignorant electorate, and not a non-Christian tribe, 
as the Philippine Commission later had the temerity 
to certify they were. Now the plain, unvarnished, 
benevolent truth is just this: The Commission knew 
that nobody in the United States, whether they were 
for retaining the Islands or against retaining them, 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 547 

had any desire to postpone granting a legislature to the 
Philippine people. So in their certificate they simply 
included everybody who had given trouble in Samar 
and Leyte as "non-Christian tribes. " The only 
justification for this was that they had in fact acted in 
a most un- Christianlike manner, — i.e., for people who 
devotedly murmur prayers to patron saints in good 
standing in the church calendar. In making their 
certificate, the Commission simply ignored the various 
uprisings of the preceding two years. They simply 
said, generously, "Oh, forget it." They knew nobody 
in the United States begrudged the Filipinos their 
conditionally promised legislature, or cared to postpone 
it. The leading Filipinos begged the authorities to 
"forget" the various disturbances that had occurred 
since the publication of the census, and there was a 
very general desire in the Islands to let bygones be 
bygones, wipe the slate, and begin again. Any other 
attitude would have meant that the legislature would 
have to be postponed. Then the opposition in the 
United States would want to know why, and by 1908 
Philippine independence might become an issue again. 
In the eyes of the Commission, the end, being benevo- 
lent, justified stretching the language of the Act of 
1902 as if it had been the blessed veil of charity itself — 
i.e., the end justified the means. In fact it did — almost 
— justify the means. But not quite. The moral 
quality of the Great Certificate of 1907 was not as 
reprehensible as General Anderson's dealings with 
Aguinaldo, already described, which, like the certificate, 
were a necessary part of the benevolent hypocrisy of 
Benevolent Assimilation of an unconsenting people. 
Yet General Anderson is an honorable man. It was 
not as bad as General Greene's juggling Aguinaldo 
out of his trenches before Manila in a friendly way, and 



548 American Occupation of Philippines 

failing to give him a receipt for said trenches, as he had 
promised to do, because such a receipt would show 
co-operation and " might look too much like an alli- 
ance." This also was done on the idea that the end 
justified the means. Yet General Greene is an honor- 
able man. The signers of the great peace certificate 
of 1907 are all honorable men. But they signed that 
certificate, just the same. " Judge not that ye be not 
judged. " All I have to say is, I would not have signed 
that certificate. I would have said: "No, gentlemen, 
the end does not justify the means. The Philippine 
Assembly must be postponed, if we are going to deal 
frankly with Congress and the folks at home. The 
conditions Congress made precedent to the grant of an 
assembly have not been met, and we each and all of 
us know it. We owe more to our own country and to 
truth than we do to the Filipinos. The Act of Congress 
of 1902 did not vest in the Philippine Commission 
authority to pardon disturbances of public order. 
It imposed upon the Commission an implied duty to 
report such disturbances, fully and frankly. It is not 
true that there has been a continuing state of general 
and complete peace in these Islands for the last two 
years, and I for one will not certify that there has been. " 

The truth is, the attitude of the signers of the certi- 
ficate was like that of Uncle Remus, when interrupted 
by the little boy in one of his stories. When Uncle 
Remus gets to the point in the rabbit story where the 
rabbit thrillingly escapes from the jaws of death, i.e., 
from the jaws of the dogs, by climbing a tree, the rapt 
listener interrupts: "Why, Uncle Remus, a rabbit 
can't climb a tree." To which Uncle Remus replies, 
with a reassuring wave of the hand, "Oh, but Honey, 
dis rabbit dess 'bleeged ter climb dis tree. " 

Should any of my good friends still in the Philippines 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 549 

feel disposed to censure such levity as the above, I can 
only say, as Kipling writes from England to his Anglo- 
Indian friends in a foreword to one of his books: 

I have told these tales of our life 

For a sheltered people's mirth, 
In jesting guise,— but ye are wise, 

And ye know what the jest is worth. 

Moreover, my authority to speak frankly about these 
matters is also aptly stated by the same great poet thus : 

I have eaten your bread and salt, 
I have drunk your water and wine, 

The deaths ye died I have watched beside 
And the lives that ye led were mine. 

Was there aught that I did not share 

In vigil or toil or ease, 
One joy or woe that I did not know, 

Dear friends across the seas? 

The above reflections are not placed before the reader 
to show him what a pity it is that the writer was not a 
member of the Philippine Commission at the time of 
their certificate of 1907, or to show what a fine thing 
for our common country it would be if he were made a 
member of that Commission now. He is, personally, 
as disinterested as if Manila were in the moon, for he 
cannot live in the tropics any more. The effect of a 
year or so of residence there upon white men invalided 
home for tropical dysentery and then returning to the 
Islands is like the effect of water upon a starched shirt. 
However, it is believed that the facts of official record 
collected in this chapter up to this point are a demon- 
stration of this proposition, to wit: What the Philip- 
pine Government needs more than anything else is that 



550 American Occupation of Philippines 

the minority party in the United States should be repre- 
sented on the Commission. By this I do not mean 
representation by what are called, under Republican 
Administrations, "White House" Democrats, nor what 
under a Democratic Administration, if one should ever 
occur, would probably be called ' ' Copperhead Repub- 
licans. " I mean the genuine article. A Democrat 
who has cast his fortunes with the Philippines is no 
longer a Democrat relatively to the Philippines, because 
the Democratic party wants to get rid of the Philippines 
and the Democrat in the Philippines of course does not. 
How absurd it is to talk about former Governors Wright 
and Smith, as "life-long Democrats," by way of pre- 
liminary to using their opinions as "admissions." 
In the law of evidence, an " admission" is a statement 
made against the interest of the party making it. 

The first election for representatives in the Philippine 
Assembly was held on July 30, 1907, and on October 
1 6th thereafter the Assembly was formally opened by 
Secretary of War, William H. Taft. The various 
"whereases" hereinabove reviewed, importing complete 
acquiescence in American rule since President Roose- 
velt's Proclamation of July 4, 1902, were first duly 
read, and then the Assembly was opened. Of course, 
no man could have been elected to the Assembly without 
at least pretending to be in favor of independence, and 
all but a corporal's guard of them were outspoken in 
favor of the proposition. As the present Governor- 
General Mr. Forbes, said, while Vice- Governor, in the 
Atlantic Monthly for February, 1909: 

To deny the capacity of one's country for * * * self- 
government is essentially unpopular. 

When he visited the Philippines to open their Assem- 
bly in 1907, Mr. Taft had said nothing definite and final 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 551 

on the question of promising independence since his 
departure from the Islands in 1903. His then benevo- 
lent unwillingness to tell them frankly he did not think 
they had sense enough to run a government of their 
own, and that they were unfit for self-government, has 
already been reviewed. For two years after 1903 
Governor Wright had made them pine for the return 
of Mr. Taft. They longed to hear again some of the 
siren notes of the celebrated speech "the Philippines 
for the Filipinos. " They had gotten very excited and 
very happy over that speech. Of course they would 
not have gotten very excited over independence sup- 
posed to be coming long after they should be dead and 
buried. During the two dark frank years of Governor 
Wright's regime, they had frequently been told that 
they were not fit for independence. So that when 
Secretary of War Taft had visited the Islands in 1905 
they all had been on the qui vive for more statements 
vaguely implying an independence they might hope to 
live to see. During the visit of 1905 the time of the 
visiting Congressional party was consumed principally 
with tariff hearings, and comparatively little was said 
on the subject uppermost in the minds of all Filipinos, 
It is true that Mr. Taft said then he was of the opinion 
that it would take a generation or longer to get the 
country ready for self-government, but he said it in a 
tactful, kindly way, and did not forever crush their 
hopes. So when he went out to the Islands to open the 
assembly in 1907, the attitude of the whole people in 
expectation of some definite utterances on the question 
of a definite promise of independence at some future 
time, was just the attitude of an audience in a theatre 
as to which one affirms "you could hear a pin fall." 
In this regard Mr. Taft's utterances were as follows 1 : 

1 See Report of Philippine Commission, 1907, pt. 1, p. 215. 



55 2 American Occupation of Philippines 

I am aware that in view of the issues discussed at the 
election of this assembly I am expected to say something 
regarding the policy of the United States toward these 
islands. I cannot speak with the authority of one who may 
control that policy. The Philippine Islands are territory 
belonging to the United States, and by the Constitution, 
the branch of that government vested with the power and 
charged with the duty of making rules and regulations for 
their government is Congress. The policy to be pursued 
with respect to them is therefore ultimately for Congress 
to determine. * * * I have no authority to speak for Con- 
gress in respect to the ultimate disposition of the Islands. 

After that there was some talk about "mutually 
beneficial trade relations" and "improvement of the 
people both industrially and in self-governing capacity. " 
But with regard to the "process of political preparation 
of the Filipino people" for self-government the Secre- 
tary said that was a question no one could certainly 
answer; and so far as he was concerned he thought it 
would take "considerable longer than a generation." 
Somewhere in the early Philippine State papers there is 
a quotation used by Mr. Taft from Shakespeare about 
1 ' Keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking 
it to the hope." The Filipinos have eagerly read for 
the last twelve years every utterance of Mr. Taft's 
that they could get hold of. If any of those embryonic 
statesmen of the first Philippine Assembly, familiar 
with the various Taft utterances, had looked up the 
context of the Shakespearian quotation above alluded 
to, he would have found it to be as follows : 

And be these juggling fiends no more believ'd, 
That palter with us in a double sense: 
That keep the word of promise to our ear 
And break it to our hope. * 

1 Macbeth, Act V., Sc. 8. 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 553 

Since the announcement by Secretary of War Taft 
at the opening of the Philippine Assembly in October, 
1907, of the policy of indefinite retention of the Islands 
with undeclared intention, the Filipinos have of course 
clearly understood that if they were ever to have inde- 
pendence they must look to Congress for it. But 
they know Congress is not interested in them and that 
they have no influence with it, and that the Hemp 
Trust, the Tobacco Trust, and the Sugar Trust, have. 
So that since 1907, both the American authorities in 
the Philippines and the Filipinos have settled down, 
the former suffused with benevolence — hardened how- 
ever by paternalistic firmness, the latter stoically, to 
the programme of indefinite retention with undeclared 
intention. No conceivable programme could be devised 
more ingeniously calculated to engender race hatred. 
The Filipino newspapers call the present policy one 
of "permanent administration for inferior and incapable 
races. " The Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, known as 
the Philippine Government Act, which is the " Constitu- 
tion, " so to speak, we have given the Filipinos, accords 
"liberty of the press" in the exact language of our own 
Constitution. The native press does not fail to use this 
liberty to the limit. Naturally the American press 
does not remain silent. So here are a pair of bellows 
ever fanning the charcoals of discontent. And the 
masses of the Filipino people read the Filipino papers. 
If they cannot read, their children can. In one of the 
reports of one of the American constabulary officials 
in the Philippines, there is an account of the influence 
of the native press too graphic to be otherwise than 
accurate. He says one can often see, in the country 
districts, a group of natives gathered about some village 
Hampden, listening to his reading the latest diatribe 
against the American Occupation. Never was there 



554 American Occupation of Philippines 

such folly in the annals of statesmanship. In their 
native papers, the race situation of course comes in for 
much comment. Now the most notorious and inflex- 
ible fact of that race situation is that the colonial Anglo- 
Saxon does not intermarry with "the yellow and 
brown" subject people, as the Latin colonizing races 
do. It would be an over-statement of the case to say 
that the Filipinos to-day had rather have the Spaniards 
back as their overlords instead of us. In 1898, they 
" tasted the sweets of liberty," to use an expression of 
one of their leaders, and I am perfectly sure that to-day 
the desire of all those people for a government of their 
own is so genuine and universal as that it amounts to a 
very hopeful positive factor in the equation of their 
capacity for self-government. But there is no doubt 
that many of the Filipinos after all have a very warm 
place in their hearts for the Spanish people. How 
could it be otherwise when so many of the Filipinos 
are sons and grandsons of Spaniards? Much of like 
and dislike in life's journey is determined pre-natally. 
On the other hand, the American women in the Philip- 
pines maintain an attitude toward the natives quite 
like that of their British sisters in Hong Kong toward 
the Chinese, and in Calcutta toward the natives there. 
The social status of an American woman who marries 
a native, — I myself have never heard of but one case — ■ 
is like that of a Pacific coast girl who marries a Jap. 
This is merely the instinct of self-defence with which 
Nature provides the weaker sex, just as she provides 
the porcupine with quills. But look at the other side 
of the picture. When an American man marries a 
native woman, he thereafter finds himself more in 
touch with his native "in-laws" it is true, but corre- 
spondingly, and ever increasingly, out of touch with 
his former associations. This is not as it should be. 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 555 

But it is a most unpleasant and inexorable fact of the 
present situation. In an address delivered at the 
Quill Club in Manila on January 25, 1909, Governor 
Smith, after reciting the various beneficent designs 
contemplated by the government and the various 
public works consummated (at the expense of the people 
of the Islands) deplored, in spite of it all, what he 
termed "the growing gulf between the races." Said 
he: 

An era of ill feeling has started between Americans and 
Filipinos, and, I hesitate to say it, race hatred. 

Cherchez la jemme ! You find her, on the one hand, 
in the American woman whose attitude has been in- 
dicated, and you find her, on the other, in the refined 
and virtuous native woman, who finds her American 
husband's relations to his compatriots altered — queered 
— since his marriage to her, no matter how faithful a 
wife and mother she may be. This is the unspeakably 
cruel situation we have forced upon the Filipino people 
— whom I really learned to respect, and became much 
attached to, before I left the Islands — and President 
Taft knows it as well as I do. Yet he does not take the 
American people into his confidence. He simply 
worries along with the situation, wishing it would get 
better, but knowing it will get worse. That this situa- 
tion is a permanent one is clearly shown by all the 
previous teachings of racial history. In his Winning of 
the West, written in 1889, speaking of the French settlers 
in the Ohio valley before 1776, and the cordial social 
relations of the dominant race with the natives — rela- 
tions which have always obtained with all Latin races 
under like circumstances — Mr. Roosevelt says (vol. i., 
page 41): 



556 American Occupation of Philippines 

They were not trammelled by the queer pride which 
makes a man of English stock unwilling to make a red- 
skinned woman his wife, though anxious enough to make 
her his concubine. 



Men of English stock have changed but little in the 
matter of race instinct since 1776. If we had a definite 
policy, declared by Congress, promising independence, 
the American attitude in the Philippines toward the 
Filipinos would at once change, from the present im- 
possible one, to our ordinary natural attitude of courtesy 
toward all foreigners, regardless of their color. 

On May 7, 1909, the Honorable James F. Smith took 
his departure from the Philippine Islands forever and 
turned over the duties of his office to the Honorable 
W. Cameron Forbes, as Acting President of the Com- 
mission and Governor-General. As in the case of 
Governors Wright and Ide, so in that of Governor 
Smith, no reason is apparent why the Washington 
Government should have been willing to dispense with 
the services of the incumbent. This w T as peculiarly true 
in the case of General Smith. He was but fifty years 
of age when he left the Islands in 1909. He has ren- 
dered more different kinds of distinguished public 
service than any American who has ever been in the 
Philippine Islands from the time Dewey's guns first 
thundered out over Manila Bay dowm to this good hour. 
Going out with the first expedition in 1898 as Colonel 
of the 1st California Regiment, he distinguished him- 
self on more than one battlefield in the early fighting 
and in recognition thereof was made a brigadier- 
general. Subsequent to this he became Military 
Governor of the island of Negros, that one of the 
six principal Visayan Islands which gave less trouble 
during the insurrection and after than 1 any other — a 



Governor Smith — 1907-9 557 

circumstance doubtless not wholly unrelated to Gen- 
eral Smith's wise and tactful administration there. 
Later on during the military regime he became Collec- 
tor of Customs of the archipelago. The revenues from 
customs are the principal source of revenue of the 
Philippine Government and the sums of money handled 
are enormous. The customs service, moreover, in 
most countries, and especially in the Philippines, is 
more subject to the creeping in of graft than any other. 
General Smith's administration of this post was in 
keeping with everything else he did in the Islands. 
When the civil government was founded by Judge 
Taft in 1901, he was appointed one of the Justices of 
the Supreme Court and filled the duties of that office 
most creditably. Thence he was promoted to the 
Philippine Commission, which is, virtually, the cabinet 
of the Governor-General. Still later he became Vice- 
Governor, and finally Governor, serving as such from 
September, 1906, to May, 1909. Any other govern- 
ment on earth that has over-seas colonies and recognizes 
the supreme importance of a maximum of continuity 
of policy, would have kept Governor Smith as long as it 
could have possibly induced him to stay, just as the 
British kept Lord Cromer in Egypt. Governor Smith 
was succeeded by a young man from Boston, who had 
come out to the Islands four years before, and who, 
prior to that time, had never had any public service 
in the United States of any kind, had never been in the 
Philippine Islands, and probably had never seen a 
Filipino until he landed at Manila. 

General Smith is now (19 12) one of the Judges of the 
Court of Customs Appeals at Washington. 



CHAPTER XXII 
Governor Forbes — 1 909-1 9 12 

The trouble with this country to-day is that, under long domination 
by the protected interests, a partnership has grown up between them 
and the Government which the best men in the Republican party could 
not break up if they would. — Woodrow Wilson. 

WHEN Governor Forbes assumed the duties of 
Governor-General of the Philippines, some ten 
years after the ratification of the Treaty of Paris 
whereby we bought the Islands, he was the ninth su- 
preme representative of American authority we had 
had there since the American occupation began. The 
following is the list: 



(1) Gen. Thomas M. Anderson June 30, 1898-July 25, il 

(2) " Wesley Merritt July 25, 1898-Aug. 29, 1; 

(3) " Elwell S. Otis Aug. 29, 1898-May 5, 1900 

(4) " Arthur MacArthur May 5, 1900-July 4, 1901 

(5) Hon. William H. Taft July 4, 1901-Dec. 23, 1903 

(6) " Luke E. Wright Dec. 23, 1903-Nov. 4, 1905 

(7) " Henry C. Ide Nov. 4, 1905-Sept. 20, 1906 

(8) " James F. Smith Sept. 20, 1906-May 7, 1909 

(9) " W. Cameron Forbes May 7, 1909- 1 

No one of these distinguished gentlemen has ever 
had any authority to tell the Filipinos what we expect 
ultimately to do with them. They have not known 
themselves. Is not this distinctly unfair both to 
governors and governed? 

1 In June, 1912, Governor Forbes was still Governor-General. 

558 



Governor Forbes — 1909-12 559 

Before Governor Forbes went to the Philippines he 
had been a largely successful business man. He is a 
man of the very highest personal character, and an 
indefatigable worker. He has done as well as the 
conditions of the problem permit. But he is always 
between Scylla and Charybdis. American capital in 
or contemplating investment in the Islands is con- 
tinually pressing to be permitted to go ahead and 
develop the resources of the Islands. To keep the 
Islands from being exploited Congress early limited 
grants of land to a maximum too small to attract capital. 
So those who desire to build up the country, knowing 
they cannot get the law changed, are forever seeking 
to invent ways to get around the law. And, being 
firm in the orthodox Administration belief that dis- 
cussion of ultimate independence is purely academic, 
i.e., a matter of no concern to anybody now living, 
Governor Forbes is of course in sympathy with Ameri- 
cans who wish to develop the resources of the Islands. 
On the other hand, he knows that such a course will 
daily and hourly make ultimate independence more 
certain never to come. So do the Filipinos know this. 
Therefore they clamor ever louder and louder against 
all American attempts to repeal the anti-exploiting 
Acts of Congress by "liberal" interpretation. Many 
an American just here is sure to ask himself, ' ' Why all 
this 'clamor'? Do we not give them good government? 
What^just ground have they for complaint?" Yes, 
we do give them very good government, so far as the 
Manila end of the business is concerned, except that 
it is a far more expensive government than any people 
on the earth would be willing to impose on themselves. 
But their main staples are hemp, sugar, and tobacco, 
and we raise the last two in this country. Their sugar 
and tobacco were allowed free entry into the United 



560 American Occupation of Philippines 

States by the Paine Law of 1909 up to amounts limited 
in the law, but the Philippine people know very well 
that American sugar and tobacco interests will either 
dwarf the growth of their sugar and tobacco industries 
by refusing to allow the limit raised — the limit of 
amounts admitted free of duty — or else that our Sugar 
Trust and our Tobacco Trust will simply ultimately 
eliminate them by absorption, just as the Standard Oil 
Company used to do with small competitors. In this 
sort of prospect certainly even the dullest intellect 
must recognize just ground for fearing— nay for plainly 
foreseeing — practical industrial slavery through control 
by foreign 1 corporations of economic conditions. So 
much for the two staples in which the Philippines may 
some day become competitors of ours. It took Mr. 
Taft nine years to persuade American sugar and to- 
bacco that they would not be in any immediate danger 
by letting in a little Philippine sugar and tobacco free 
of duty. Then they consented. Not until then did 
they promise not to shout "Down with cheap Asiatic 
labor. We will not consent to compete with it." 
Their mental reservation was, of course, and is, "if 
the Philippine sugar and tobacco industries get too 
prosperous, we will either buy them, or cripple them 
by defeating their next attempt to get legislation in- 
creasing the amounts of Philippine sugar and tobacco 
admitted into the United States free of duty." And 
the Filipinos know that this is the fate that awaits 
two out of the three main sources of the wealth of their 
country. Their third source of wealth, their main 
staple, is the world-famous Manila hemp. This repre- 
sents more than half the value of their total annual 
exports. And as to it, "practical industrial slavery 
through control by foreign corporations of economic 
1 By "foreign" I mean, of course, American, i.e., non-resident. 



Governor Forbes — 1 909- 12 56 1 

conditions" is to-day not a fear, but a fact. The 
International Harvester Company has its agents at 
Manila. The said company or allied interests, or 
both, are large importers of Manila hemp. The reports 
of all the governors-general of the Philippines who have 
preceded Governor Forbes tell, year after year, of the 
millions "handed over" to American hemp importers 
through "the hemp joker" of the Act of Congress of 
1902, hereinafter explained, in the chapter on Congres- 
sional Legislation (Chapter XXVI.). Why did these 
complaints — made with annual regularity up to Gov- 
ernor Forbes's accession — cease thereafter? You will 
find these complaints of his predecessors transcribed 
in the chapter mentioned, because if I had re-stated 
them you might suspect exaggeration^ The ' ' rake-off ' ' 
of the American importers of Manila hemp for 19 10 
was nearly $750,000, as fully explained in Chapter 
XXVI. 

Governor Forbes will be in this country when this 
book is issued. I think he owes it to the American 
people to explain why he does not continue the efforts 
of his predecessors to halt the depredations of the 
Hemp Trust. Why does he content himself in his last 
annual report with a mild allusion to the fact that the 
condition of the hemp industry is "not satisfactory"? 
I have said that Governor Forbes is a man of high 
character, and take pleasure in repeating that state- 
ment in this connection. The truth is we are running 
a political kindergarten for adults in the Philippines, 
and those responsible for the original blunder of taking 
them, and all their political heirs and assigns since, 
have sought to evade admitting and setting to work 
to rectify the blunder. Unmasked, this is what the 
policy of Benevolent Assimilation now is. They al- 
lege an end, and so justify all the ways and means. 
36 



562 American Occupation of Philippines 

Benevolent Assimilation needs the support of the 
International Harvester Company and of all other Big 
Business interested directly or indirectly in Manila 
hemp. The end justifies the means. Hence the 
silence. Philippine gubernatorial reticence is always 
most reticent about that particular subject on which 
at the time the American people are most peculiarly 
entitled to information. As long as public order was 
the most pressing question, Philippine gubernatorial 
reticence selected that branch of our colonial problem 
either for especial silence or for superlatively casual 
allusion, as we have already seen. So now with the 
economic distresses. Frankness would obviously fur- 
nish too much good argument for winding up this 
Oriental receivership of ours. The Philippine Govern- 
ment will never tell its main current troubles until after 
they are over. But as the present trouble — the eco- 
nomic depredations of powerful special interests — 
must necessarily be fruitful of discontent which will 
crop out some day to remind us that as we sow so shall 
we reap, any one who helps expose the root of the trouble 
is doing a public service. No Congressman who in 
silence would permit Big Business to prey upon his 
constituents as Governor Forbes has, could long remain 
in office. Taxation without representation may amount 
to depredation, and yet never be corrected, when the 
powers that prey have the ear of the court, and the 
victims cannot get the ear of the American people. 
So the Hemp Trust continues to rob the Filipinos 
under the forms of law, and the Mohonk Conference 
continues to kiss Benevolent Assimilation on both 
cheeks. And Dr. Lyman Abbott periodically says 
Amen. I am not speaking disrespectfully of Dr. 
Abbott. I am deploring the lack of information of our 
people at home as to conditions in the Philippines. 



Governor Forbes — 1 909- 1 2 563 

It is a relief to turn from such matters to some of the 
real substantial good we have done out there to which 
Governor Forbes has heretofore publicly pointed with 
just pride. In an article in the Atlantic Monthly for 
February, 1909, Governor Forbes (then Vice-Gover- 
nor) said, among other things: 

We have completed the separation of Church and State, 
buying out from the religious orders their large agricultural 
properties, which are now administered by the government 
for the benefit of the tenants. 

This statement I cannot too cordially endorse. It 
would be grossly unfair not to accord full measure of 
acclaim to Governor Taft for the way he worked out 
the problem of the Friar Lands. He has been attacked 
in some quarters in this regard, and most unjustly. 
Not being a Catholic, and all my people being Protes- 
tants, I have no fear of being suspected of special 
pleading in the matter. The working out of the Friar 
Land problem by Governor Taft in the Philippines was 
a splendid piece of constructive statesmanship. He was 
at his greatest and best in that very transaction. The 
Treaty of Paris had guaranteed that all vested rights 
should be respected, including those of ecclesiastical 
bodies. The friars had long owned the lands in 
question. There can be no particle of doubt on this 
point. The tenants on the land had all long ago 
attorned to them, father and son, from time out of 
mind, paying rent regularly. But by claiming juris- 
diction over their tenants' souls also, and getting that 
jurisdiction effectively recognized, the thrifty friars 
used to raise the rent regularly, quieting incipient 
protest with threats of eternal punishment, or pro- 
tracted stay in purgatory. The advent of our govern- 
ment let loose a revolt against the authority of the 



564 American Occupation of Philippines 

friars generally, and, their spiritual hold once loosened, 
this led the tenants to dispute the land titles of their 
spiritual shepherds, who were also their temporal 
landlords. Of course the titles had all been long 
recorded, and looked after by the best legal talent the 
country afforded. As long as you control the future of 
your tenant's soul, you can make him pay his last 
copeck for rent. But as soon as that control is lost, 
the man on whom the governing of the country there- 
after devolves has a certain prospect of a great agrarian 
revolution on his hands, having in it many elements of 
substantial righteousness. Governor Taft's capacious 
mind, prompted by his strongest instinct, love of jus- 
tice, conceived the idea of having the Philippine Govern- 
ment raise the money to buy the Friar Lands, by issuing 
bonds, and then buying the Friars out and re-selling 
the land to the tenants on long time, on the instalment 
plan, the instalments to be so graduated as to be equal 
to a moderate rental. Each tenant stayed right where 
he had been all the time, in possession of the tract he 
had always tilled, he and his father before him. To 
arrange all this it took an Act of Congress authorizing 
the bond issue, and a visit to Rome to arrange the 
bargain with the Pope. Some say His Holiness drove 
a hard bargain with Governor Taft, or to put it another 
way, that Governor Taft paid the Church people too 
much for the land. He did not. He may not have 
counted pennies with them, but the lands were worth 
what he paid for them. And the purchase protected 
the faith and honor of our government, as pledged by 
the Treaty of Paris, and at the same time prevented 
an agrarian revolution — which would have had a lot 
of elemental justice on its side. 

Another of the good works we have done in the 
Philippines, to which Governor Forbes points in his 



Governor Forbes — 1 909- 1 2 565 

magazine article above mentioned, is thus noted by 
him: 

We have put the finances on a sound and sensible basis. 

To this also I say Amen. The Forbes article then goes 
on to say that the government of the Islands is self- 
supporting. This is true, except the $14,000,000 a year 
it costs us to keep out there a garrison of 12,000 Ameri- 
can troops (supplemented by certain native scouts — 
see chapter on "Cost of the Philippines," hereafter). 
This garrison is conceded to be a mere handful, sufficient 
merely, and intended merely — as a witty English 
woman has put it in a book on the Philippines—" to 
knock the Filipino on the head in case he wants his 
liberty before the Americans think he is fit for it." 
In other words, we only attempt to keep force enough 
there to quell any outbreak that might occur. So far 
as possible invasion by any foreign power is concerned, 
our $14,000,000 per annum is an absolutely dead loss. 
Brigadier- General Clarence Edwards, U. S. A., com- 
manding the Bureau of Insular Affairs, said recently 1 
before the Finance Committee of the Senate : 

I would never think of the Philippines as a military 
problem for defence. If any nation wants them, it is 
merely a declaration of war. 

What a shameful admission for a great nation to 
subscribe to, relatively to people it pretends to be pro- 
tecting! The programme of the War Department is 
to abandon the Islands to their fate, for the time being 
at least, in our next war, letting them remain a foot- 
ball until the end of such war, when, as an independent 
republic they could, and would, rally as one man to 
the defence of their country against invasion, and 

1 Hearings on Sugar, April 5, 19 12. 



566 American Occupation of Philippines 

would, with a little help from us, make life unbearable 
for an invading force. As things stand, we are just as 
impotent as Spain was out there in 1898, and it is 
utter folly to forget what happened then. 

But to return to Governor Forbes's article and to a 
pleasanter feature of the situation. He says: 

We have established schools throughout the archipelago, 
teaching upward of half a million children. 

This also is true, and greatly to our credit. But as 
the American hemp trust mulcts the Philippine hemp 
output about a half million dollars a year (as above 
suggested, and later, in another chapter, more fully 
explained), it follows that each Filipino child pays the 
hemp trust a dollar a year for the privilege of going to 
school. 

And now let us consider the most supremely impor- 
tant part of Governor Forbes's magazine article above 
quoted. The burden of the song of the adverse minor- 
ity report on the pending Jones bill (looking to Philip- 
pine independence in 1921) 1 is that because there are 
certain "wild tribes" scattered throughout the archi- 
pelago, in the mountain fastnesses, therefore we should 
cling to the present policy of indefinite retention with 
undeclared intention until the wild tribes get civilized. 
Governor Forbes's article is an absolute, complete, and 
final answer to the misinformed nonsense of the minor- 
ity report aforesaid. He says, apropos of public order: 

It is now safe to travel everywhere throughout the 
Islands without carrying a weapon, excepting only in some 
of the remote parts of the mountains, where lurk bands of 
wild tribes who might possibly mistake the object of a 

1 Introduced in the House of Representatives by Hon. W. A. Jones, of 
Va., Chairman of the Committee on Insular Affairs of the House, in 
March, 1912. 



Governor Forbes — 1 909- 12 567 

visit, and in the southern part of the great island of 
Mindanao which is inhabited by intractable Moros. 

The foregoing unmasks, in all its contemptible 
falsehood, the pretence that the presence of a few wild 
tribes in the Philippines is a reason for withholding 
independence from 7,000,000 of Christian people in 
order that a greedy little set of American importers 
of Manila hemp may fatten thereon. True, hemp is 
not edible, but it is convertible into edibles — and also 
into campaign funds. That the existence of these 
wild tribes — the dog-eating Igorrotes and other savages 
you saw exhibited at the St. Louis Exposition of 1903-4 
— constitute infinitely less reason for withholding inde- 
pendence from the Filipinos than the American Indian 
constituted in 1776 for withholding independence from 
us, will be sufficiently apparent from a glance at the 
following table, taken from the American Census of 



Islands oj 1 


Q03 (vol. 11., p. 


123). 


Total 


Island 


Civilized 


Wild 


Luzon 


3,575,001 


223,506 


3,798,507 


Panay 


728,713 


H,933 


743,646 


Cebu 


592,247 




592,247 


Bohol 


243,148 




243,148 


Negros 


439,559 


21,217 


460,776 


Leyte 


357,641 




357,641 


Samar 


222,002 


688 


222,690 


Mindanao 


246,694 


252,940 


499,634 



I think the above table makes clear the enormity of 
the injustice I am now trying to crucify. Without 
stopping to use your pencil, you can see that Mindanao, 
the island where the "intractable Moros' ' Governor 

x See also, in connection with this table, the folding map of the 
archipelago at the end of the book. 



568 American Occupation of Philippines 

Forbes speaks of live, contains about a half million 
people. Half of these are civilized Christians, and the 
other half are the wild, crudely Mohammedan Moro 
tribes. Above Mindanao on the above list, you behold 
what practically is the Philippine archipelago (except 
Mindanao), viz., Luzon and the six main Visayan Is- 
lands. If you will turn back to pages 225 et seq., 
especially to page 228, where the student of world 
politics was furnished with all he needs or will ever 
care to know about the geography of the Philippine 
Islands, you will there find all the rocks sticking out 
of the water and all the little daubs you see on the map 
eliminated from the equation as wholly unessential to 
a clear understanding of the problem of governing the 
Islands. That process of elimination left us Luzon and 
the six main Visayan Islands above, as constituting, for 
all practical governmental purposes all the Philippine 
archipelago except the Moro country, Mindanao (i.e., 
parts of it), and its adjacent islets. Luzon and the 
Visayan Islands contain nearly 7,000,000 of people, and 
of these the wild tribes, as you can see by a glance at 
the above table, constitute less than 300,000, sprinkled 
in the pockets of their various mountain regions. 
Nearly all these 300,000 are quite tame, peaceable, and 
tractable, except, as Governor Forbes suggests, they 
"might possibly mistake the object of a visit." The 
half million " intractable Moros" of Mindanao, plus 
those in the adjacent islets, make up another 300,000. 
These last, it is true, will need policing for some time 
to come, but whether we do that policing by retaining 
Mindanao, or whether we let the Filipinos do it, is a 
detail that has no standing in court as a reason for 
continuing to deny independence to the 7,000,000 of 
people of Luzon and the Visayan Islands because they 
have some 300,000 backward people in the backwoods of 



Governor Forbes — 1 909- 1 2 569 

their mountains. Yet see how the ingenuity of inspired 
ignorance states the case, by adding the 300,000 tame 
tribes of Luzon and the Visayas to the 300,000 fierce 
Moro savages away down in Mindanao, near Borneo, 
so as to get 600,000 "wild" people, and then alluding 
to the fact that so far only 200,000 Filipinos are quali- 
fied to vote. Says the report of the minority of the 
Committee on Insular Affairs on the pending Jones bill 
(proposing independence in 1921): 

The wild and uncivilized inhabitants of the islands out- 
number, 3 to 1, those who would be qualified to vote 
under the pending bill [the Jones bill]. 

You see the minority report is counting women and 
children, when it talks about the wild tribes, but not 
when it talks about voters. According to universally 
accepted general averages, among 7,500,000 people you 
should find 1,500,000 adult males. No one doubts that 
of these, by 192 1, 500,000 will have become qualified 
voters. No one can deny that any such country 
having 500,000 qualified voters, the bulk of whom are 
good farmers, and the cream of whom are high-minded 
educated gentlemen, and all of whom are intensely 
patriotic, will be in good shape for promotion to inde- 
pendence. What wearies me about this whole matter 
is that the minority report above mentioned is per- 
mitted to get off such "rot, " and the New York Times, 
the Army and Navy Journal, and others, to applaud 
it, while the Administration sits by, silent, and reaps 
the benefit of such stale, though not intentional, false- 
hoods, without attempting to correct them, so that our 
people may get at the real merits of the question. You 
see this silence inures to the benefit of the interests 
that have cornered the Manila hemp industry. 



570 American Occupation of Philippines 

In the campaign of 1912 for the Republican nomina- 
tion for the Presidency, there was much mutual re- 
crimination between Colonel Roosevelt and Mr. Taft 
about which of them had been kindest to the Inter- 
national Harvester Company. It seems to me it is 
"up to" Governor Forbes, who in the Philippines has 
served under the present President and his predecessor 
also, to explain why he has abandoned the fight, so 
long waged by previous governors-general, to get 
what former Governor- General James F. Smith calls 
"the [hemp] joker" of the Act of Congress of 1902 
concerning the Philippines, wiped from the statute 
books of this country. 



CHAPTER XXIII 
" Non-Christian ' ' Worcester 

The cry of remote distress is ever faintly heard. 

Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 

IN the year 191 1, the editor of one of the great metro- 
politan papers told me that President Taft told 
him that the Honorable Dean C. Worcester, the Secre- 
tary of the Interior of the Philippine Government, was 
4 'the most valuable man we have on the Philippine 
Commission." Certainly, reproduction of such an in- 
dorsement from so exalted a source shows a wish to 
be fair, in one who considers Professor Worcester the 
direst calamity that has befallen the Filipinos since the 
American occupation, neither war, pestilence, famine, 
reconcentration, nor tariff-wrought poverty excepted. 
During all my stay in the Philippines I never did have 
any official relations of any sort with the Professor, 
and only met him, casually, once, in 1901. The per- 
sonal impression left from the meeting was distinctly 
that of an overbearing bully of the beggar-on-horse- 
back type. Conscious of liability to error, and pre- 
ferring that the reader should judge for himself, I give 
the main circumstances upon which this impression 
is based. Soon after the central insular government 
was set up, in 1901, Judge Taft and certain other mem- 
bers of the Philippine Commission, the Professor among 
the number, came into my judicial district to organize 

571 



572 American Occupation of Philippines 

provincial governments. Their coming to each town 
where they stopped was telegraphed in advance, and 
before they reached the town where I then was holding 
court each one of the American colony of the town was 
designated by common consent to look after a fraction 
of the Taft party during their stay. The Professor 
fell to my lot. I always was unlucky. However, 
their stay was only a few hours. While they were 
there, I had occasion to observe that the Professor 
spoke Spanish quite well and so remarked to him. The 
well-bred reply was: "You '11 find that I know a great 
many things you might not think I knew. " Whether 
this was merely "The insolence of office" cropping out 
in a previously obscure young man suddenly elevated 
to high station, or whether it was an evidence of the 
Commissioner's idea of the relation of the Executive 
Department of a government to its Judiciary, is a 
question. * At all events I think the incident gives an 
insight into the man not irrelevant to what is herein- 
after submitted. I have met a number of other Ameri- 
cans since who had received impressions similar to my 
own. And the Professor's whole subsequent course in 
the Islands corroborates those impressions. I have 
never talked to any American in the Philippines who had 
a good word for him. Of course, Power, like Property, 
will always have friends. So that even Professor 
Worcester may have some friends, among his fellow- 

x The greatest defect of the Philippine Government was in the 
beginning, and still is, that the Philippine Commission, which is the 
executive authority, controls the appointment and assignment of 
the trial judges, and also, largely, their chances for promotion to the 
Supreme Bench of the Islands. The Justices of the Supreme Court 
are appointed by the President of the United States, often on recom- 
mendation of the Commission, but thereafter they are absolutely 
independent. The trial judges ought also to be appointed by the 
President of the United States. 



" Non-Christian " Worcester 573 

countrymen in those far-away Islands. But it has 
already been made clear in a former chapter how 
entirely possible it is for a man occupying high position 
in the government out there to be very generally 
and cordially disliked by his own countrymen there and 
actually not know it. Whether this is true of Professor 
Worcester, or not, as a general proposition it is quite 
possible. One thing is certain, namely, that he is 
very generally and very cordially detested by the Fili- 
pinos. That this detestation is perfectly natural 
under the circumstances, and entirely justifiable, and 
that it is a cruel injustice to those people, as well as a 
monumental piece of folly, to keep the Professor saddled 
upon them, it is now in order to show. 

In Chapter VI (ante) , we made the acquaintance of 
two young naval officers, Paymaster W. B. Wilcox and 
Naval Cadet L. R. Sargent, who, in the fall of 1898, 
while the fate of the Philippines hung in the balance 
at Paris, and peace still reigned in the Islands between 
us and the Filipinos, made a trip through the interior 
of Luzon, covering some six hundred miles, and after- 
wards furnished Admiral Dewey with a written report 
of their trip, which was later published as a Senate 
document. Professor Worcester's greatest value to 
President Taft, and also the thing out of which has 
grown, most unfortunately, what seems to be a very 
cordial mutual hatred between him and the Filipinos, 
is his activities in the matter of discovering, getting 
acquainted with, classifying, tabulating, enumerating, 
and otherwise preparing for salvation, the various 
non-Christian tribes. These tribes have already been 
briefly dealt with in Chapter XXL (ante), apropos of 
that part of the Great Peace Certificate of 1907 which 
related to the "Moros and other non-Christian tribes" 
— uncivilized tribes which, being as distinct from the 



574 American Occupation of Philippines 

great mass of the Filipino people as islets from the sea, 
had had no more to do with the insurrection against us, 
than the Pawnees, Apaches, and Sioux Indians had 
to do with our Civil War of 1 861-5. They were also 
dealt with, somewhat, in the chapter preceding this. 
Long before Professor Worcester was permanently in- 
flicted upon the Filipino people, one of the young naval 
officers above mentioned, Mr. Sargent, published an 
article in the Outlook for September 2, 1899, ■ based on 
this trip through the interior of Luzon, made by author- 
ity of Admiral Dewey the year before. In the course 
of his article Mr. Sargent says : 

Some years ago, at an exposition held at Barcelona, 
Spain, a man and woman were exhibited as representative 
types of the inhabitants of Luzon. The man wore a loin 
cloth, and the woman a scanty skirt. It was evident that 
they belonged to the lowest plane of savagery. 

He adds: 

/ think no deeper wound was ever inflicted upon the pride 
of the real Filipino people than that caused by this exhibition, 
the knowledge of which seems to have spread throughout the 
island. The man and woman, while actually natives of 
Luzon, were captives of a wild tribe of Igorrotes of the 
hills. 

Professor Worcester was originally a professor of 
zoology, or something of that sort, in a western univer- 
sity. In the early nineties he had made a trip to the 
Philippines, confining himself then mostly to creeping 
things and quadrupeds — lizards, alligators, pythons, 
unusual wild beasts, and other forms of animal life of 
the kind much coveted as specimens by museums and 

1 Republished, Congressional Record, January 9, 1900, p. 715. 



" Non-Christian ' Worcester 575 

universities. In 1899, just after the Spanish War, he 
got out a book on the Philippines, and as an American 
who had been in the Philippines was then a rara avis, 
it came to pass that the reptile-finder ultimately became 
a statesman. He was brought, possibly by conscious 
worth, to the notice of President McKinley, accom- 
panied the Schurman Commission to the Islands, in 
1899, and the Taft Commission in 1900, and finally 
evolved into his present eminence as Secretary of the 
Interior and official chief finder of non-Christian tribes 
for the Philippine Government. 

The best known of the wild tribes in the Philippines 
are the Igorrotes, the dog-eating savages you saw at 
the St. Louis Exposition in 1903-4, the same Mr. Sar- 
gent speaks of in his article in the Outlook. Of course 
it was not a desire to misrepresent the situation, but 
only the enthusiasm of a zoologist, anthropologically 
inclined, and accustomed to carry a kodak, which 
started the Professor to photographing the dog-eating 
Igorrotes and specimens of other non-Christian tribes 
soon after the Taft Commission reached the Philippines. 
But you cannot get far in the earlier reports of the Taft 
Commission, which was supposed to have been sent out 
to report back on the capacity of the Filipinos for self- 
government, without crossing the trail of the Professor's 
kodak — pictures of naked Igorrotes and the like. This, 
however innocent, must have been of distinct political 
value in 1900 and 1904 in causing the heart of the 
missionary vote in the United States to bleed for those 
"sixty different tribes having sixty different languages" 
of which Secretary Root's campaign speeches made so 
much. It must also have greatly awakened the philan- 
thropic interest of exporters of cotton goods to learn 
of those poor " savage millions" wearing only a loin 
cloth, when they could be wearing yards of cotton 



576 American Occupation of Philippines 

cloth. By the time the St. Louis Exposition came off, 
in 1903-4, it was decided to have the various tribes 
represented there. So specimens were sent of the 
Igorrote tribe, the Tagalos, the Yisayans, the Negrito 
tribe, and various other tribes. The Tagalos, the 
Yisayans, etc., being ordinary Filipinos, did not prove 
money-makers. But it was great sport to watch the 
Igorrotes preparing their morning dog. So it was the 
"non-Christian tribes" that paid. It was they that 
were most advertised. It was the recollection of them 
that lingered longest with the visitor to the Exposition, 
and there was always in his mind thereafter an asso- 
ciation of ideas between the Igorrotes and Filipino 
capacity for self-government generally. Many repre- 
sentative Filipinos visited the St. Louis Exposition, 
saw all this, and came home and told about it. One 
very excellent Filipino gentleman, a friend of mine, 
who was Governor of Samar during my administration 
of the district which included that island, sent me one 
day in October, 1904, a satirical note, enclosing a 
pamphlet he had just received called Catalogue of 
Philippine Views at the St. Louis Exposition. He 
knew I would understand, so he said in the note, that 
the pamphlet was sent "in order that you may learn 
something of certain tribes still extant in this country." 
Concerning all this, I can say of my own knowledge 
exactly what Xaval Cadet Sargent said concerning the 
lesser like indignity of the one Igorrote couple exhibited 
at Barcelona while the Filipi?ios were asking representa- 
tion in the Spanish Cortes, viz.: 

I think no deeper wound was ever inflicted upon the pride 
of the real Filipino people than that caused by this exhibi- 
tion, the knowledge of which seems to have spread through- 
out the islands. 



" Non-Christian " Worcester 577 

You see our Census of 1903 gave the population of 
the Philippines at about 7,600,000 of which 7,000,000 
are put down as civilized Christians ; and of the remain- 
ing 600,000, about half are the savage, or semi-civi- 
lized, crudely Mohammedan Moros, in Mindanao, and 
the adjacent islets down near Borneo. The other 
300,000 or so uncivilized people scattered throughout 
the rest of the archipelago, the ''non-Christian tribes, " 
which dwell in the mountain fastnesses, remote from 
"the madding crowd, " cut little more figure, if any, in 
the general political equation, than the American Indian 
does with us to-day. Take for instance the province 
of Nueva Vizcaya, in the heart of north central Luzon. 
That was one of the provinces of the First Judicial Dis- 
trict I presided over in the Islands. I think Nueva 
Vizcaya is Professor Worcester's "brag" province, in 
the matter of non-Christian anthropological specimens, 
both regarding their number and their variety. Yet 
while I was there, though we knew those people were 
up in the hills, and that there were a good many of them, 
the civilized people all told us that the hill-tribes never 
bothered them. And on their advice I have ridden in 
safety, unarmed, at night, accompanied only by the 
court stenographer, over the main high-road running 
through the central plateau that constitutes the bulk 
of Nueva Vizcaya province, said plateau being sur- 
rounded by a great amphitheatre of hills, the habitat 
of the Worcester pets. 

The non-Christian tribes in the Philippines have been 
more widely advertised in America than anything else 
connected with the Islands. That advertisement has 
done more harm to the cause of Philippine independence 
by depreciating American conceptions concerning 
Filipino capacity for self-government, than anything 
that could be devised even by the cruel ingenuity of 



57 8 American Occupation of Philippines 

studied mendacity. And Professor Worcester is the 
P. T. Barnum of the "non-Christian tribe" industry. 
The Filipinos, though unacquainted with the career 
of the famous menagerie proprietor last named, and his 
famous remark: "The American people love to be 
humbugged," understand the malign and far-reaching 
influence upon their future destiny of the work of 
Professor Worcester, and his services to the present 
Philippine policy of indefinite retention with undeclared 
intention, through humbugging the American people 
into the belief that the Islands must be retained until the 
three hundred thousand or so Negritos, Igorrotes, and 
other primitive wild peoples sprinkled throughout the 
archipelago are "reconstructed." Is it any wonder 
that the Filipinos do not love the Professor? To keep 
him saddled upon them as one of their rulers is as tact- 
ful as it would be to send Senator Tillman on a diplo- 
matic mission to Liberia or Haiti. 

Not long ago the famous magazine publisher Mr. S. S. 
McClure, who, I think, is trying to make his life one of 
large and genuine usefulness for good, said to me that 
if we gave the Filipinos self-government we would 
shortly have another Haiti or Santo Domingo on our 
hands. He must have seen some of Professor Worces- 
ter's pictures of Igorrotes and Negritos scattered 
through public documents related to the question of 
Filipino capacity for self-government. Mr. McClure 
has never, I believe, been in the Islands; and the cruelly 
unjust impression he had innocently received was 
precisely the impression systematically developed all 
these years through the Worcester kodak. 

In February, 191 1, there appeared an article in the 
Sunset magazine for that month entitled "The Philip- 
pines as I Saw them. " The contributor of the article 
is no less a personage than the Honorable James F. 



" Non-Christian " Worcester 579 

Smith, former Governor-General of the Islands. At 
the top of the article one reads the legend " Illustrated 
by Photographs through the Courtesy of the Bureau of 
Insular Affairs." If you read this legend under stand- 
ingly, you can, in so doing, hear the click of the Worcester 
kodak. General Smith's article is smeared all over 
with such pictures. One is merrily entitled " Eighteen 
Igorrot Fledglings Hatched by the American Bird of 
Freedom." Another is entitled "Subano Man and 
woman, Mindanao. " Another is a picture of an Ifugao 
home in the province of Nueva Viz cay a, hereinabove 
mentioned. Ifugao is the name of one of the wild 
tribes, one of the results of Professor Worcester's 
anthropological excavations of the last few years. In 
front of the Ifugao home stands the master of the house, 
clothed in a breech-clout. Next in the menagerie in 
the article under consideration you find a group of 
Ifugao children, then a Bagobo of Mindanao, then some 
other specimen with a curious name, in which there is a 
woman naked from the waist up and a man in a loin- 
cloth. Then follows a picture of a Tingyan girl from 
Abra province. And, to cap the climax, among the 
last of these pictures you find a Filipino couple pounding 
rice. The rice pounders are ordinary Filipinos. The 
woman is decently dressed; the man is clothed only 
from the waist down, having divested himself of his 
upper garment, as is customary in order to work at 
hard labor more comfortably in hot weather. I do 
not so much blame General Smith for this libellous 
panorama of pictures, scattered though they are 
through an article by him on "The Philippines 
as I Saw them." He probably illustrated his article 
with what the Bureau of Insular Affairs sent him, with- 
out giving much thought to the matter. But the 
Bureau of Insular Affairs appears to neglect no occasion 



580 American Occupation of Philippines 

to parade the Philippine archipelago's sprinkling of 
non-Christian tribes before the American public, fully 
knowing that the hopes of the Filipinos for independence 
must depend upon impressions received by the Ameri- 
can people concerning the degree of civilization they 
have reached. 

For all these wanton indignities offered their pride and 
self-respect, the Filipinos well know they are primarily 
indebted to Professor Worcester and his non-Chris- 
tian tribe bureau. The feud between the Professor 
and the Filipino people — the bad blood has been 
growing so long that the incident hereinafter related 
justifies its being called a feud — has been peculiarly 
embittered by the missionary aspect of the non-Chris- 
tian industry. The great body of the Filipino people, 
the whole six or seven millions of them, are Catholics — 
most of them devout Catholics. Presumably, their de- 
sire for salvation by the method handed down by their 
forefathers would not be affected by a change from 
American political supervision to independence. Yet 
the darkest thing ahead of Philippine independence 
prospects is the Protestant missionary vote in the 
United States. Bishop Brent, Episcopal Bishop of 
the Philippines, one of the noblest and most saintly 
characters that ever lived, has devoted his life appar- 
ently to missionary work in the Philippines, having 
twice declined a nomination as Bishop of Washing- 
ton (D. C). The only field of endeavor open to Bishop 
Brent and his devoted little band of co-workers is the 
non-Christian tribes. It seems that the Catholic 
and Protestant ecclesiastical authorities in the Islands 
get along harmoniously, a kind of modus vivendi having 
been arranged between them, by which the Protestants 
are not to do any proselyting among the seven millions 
of Catholic Christians. So this field of endeavor is 



" Non-Christian " Worcester 581 

the one Professor Worcester has been industriously 
preparing during the last twelve years. Obviously, 
every time Professor Worcester digs up a new non- 
Christian tribe he increases the prospective harvest 
of the Protestants, thus corralling more missionary vote 
at home for permanent retention of the Philippines. 
Professor Worcester is quoted in a Manila paper as 
saying, "I am under no delusion as to what may be 
accomplished for the primitive wild people. It takes 
time to reconstruct them." This remark is supposed 
to have been made in a speech before the Young Men's 
Christian Association of Manila. Neither is Mr. Taft 
under any delusion as to how valuable is religious sup- 
port for the idea of retaining the Philippines as a mis- 
sionary field. The nature of the above allusion to 
Bishop Brent should certainly be sufficient to show that 
the writer yields to no one in affectionate reverence 
and respect for that rare and noble character. But 
neither Bishop Brent nor any one else can persuade him 
that it is wise to abandon the principle that Church and 
State should be separate, in order that our government 
may go into the missionary business. Since it has be- 
come apparent that the Philippines will not pay, the 
Administration has relied solely on missionary senti- 
ment. In one of his public utterances Mr. Taft has 
said in effect, "The programme of the Republican party 
with regard to the Philippines is one which will make 
greatly for the spread of Christian civilization through- 
out the Orient. " 

The foregoing reflections are not intended to raise 
an issue as to the wisdom of foreign missions. They are 
simply intended to illustrate how it is possible and 
natural for President Taft to consider Professor Wor- 
cester "the most valuable man we have on the Philip- 
pine Commission." The Professor's menagerie is a 



582 American Occupation of Philippines 

vote-getter. Also, President Taft's whole Philippine 
policy being founded upon the theory that "the great 
majority' ' of the Filipino people are in favor of alien 
thraldom in lieu of independence, he tolerantly per- 
mits their editors to "let off steam" through clamor for 
independence. This privilege they do not fail to 
exercise to the limit. The attitude of the Insular 
Government permits the native press much latitude 
of "sauciness, " in deference to the American idea 
about liberty of the press. In the exercise of this 
privilege during the last few years the native press has 
gone the limit. However, there was no way to stop 
them, on the principle to which we had committed 
ourselves. The thing was very mischievous, and be- 
came utterly intolerable. There was a native paper 
called Renacimiento (Renaissance). This paper was 
long permitted to say things more or less seditious in 
character which no self-respecting government should 
have tolerated. This was done pursuant to the original 
theory, obstinately adhered to up to date, that there 
was no real substantial unwillingness to American 
rule. Of course, if this were true, newspaper noise 
could do no harm. Therefore it was permitted to 
continue. Finally, however, like a boy "taking a 
dare," the Renacimiento published an article on Pro- 
fessor Worcester which intimately and sympathetically 
voiced the general yearning of the Filipino people to 
be rid of the Professor. In so doing, however, the 
hapless editor overstepped the limits of American 
license, and got into the toils of the law, by saying 
things about the Professor that rendered the editor 
liable to prosecution for criminal libel. The Professor 
promptly took advantage of this misstep, to the great 
joy of the authorities, who had been previously much 
goaded by independence clamor. The result was that 



" Non-Christian '■'. Worcester 583 

the paper was put out of business and the editor was 
put in jail. No doubt the editor ought to have been 
put in jail, but his incarceration incidentally served 
to tone down Filipino clamor for independence. Sub- 
sequent to this coup d'etat, the Professor did a little 
venting of feelings in his turn. He made a speech at 
the Y. M. C. A. on October 10, 19 10, which was a 
highly unchristian speech to be gotten off in an edi- 
fice dedicated to the service of Christ. The Manila 
papers give only extracts from the speech, and I have 
never seen a copy of it. From the newspaper accounts, 
it seems that the Professor was determined to, and did, 
relieve his feelings about the Filipinos. The Manila 
Cable-News of October 11, 1910, quotes the Professor 
as referring to his pets, the non-Christian tribes, as 
"ancestral enemies of the Christians." Thus for the 
first time is developed an attitude of being champion 
of the uncivilized pagan remnant, left from prehistoric 
times, against the Christians of the Islands. The 
Cable-News also says that Professor Worcester "laughed 
at the idea that the Islands belonged to the so-called 
civilized people and held that if the archipelago belonged 
to any one it certainly belonged to its original owners 
the Negritos. " This remark about the " so-called 
civilized people 1 ' was as tactful as if President Taft 
should address a meeting of colored people in a doubt- 
ful state and call them "niggers." Another of the 
Manila papers gives an account of the speech from 
which it appears that the burly Professor succeeded in 
amusing himself at least, if not his audience, by sug- 
gestions as to the superior fighting qualities of the 
Moros over the Filipinos, which suggestions were on 
the idea that the Moros would lick the Filipinos if we 
should leave the country. (The Moros number 300,000, 
the Filipinos nearly 7,000,000.) The Professor's re- 



584 American Occupation of Philippines 

marks in this regard, according to the paper, were a 
distinct reflection upon the courage of the Filipinos 
generally as a people. The effect of Professor Worces- 
ter's speech before the Y. M. C. A. may be well imagined. 
However the facts of history do not leave the imagina- 
tion unaided. The Philippine Assembly, representing 
the whole Filipino people, and desiring to express the 
unanimous feeling of those people with regard to the 
Worcester speech, unanimously passed, soon after 
the speech was delivered, a set of resolutions whereof 
the following is a translation: 



Resolved that the regret of the Assembly be recorded for 
the language attributed to the Honorable Dean C. Wor- 
cester, Secretary of the Interior of the Philippine Govern- 
ment in a discourse before the Young Men's Christian 
Association, October 10, 1910. It is improper and censur- 
able in a man who holds a public office and who has the 
confidence of the government. And as the statements 
made as facts are false, slanderous, and offensive to the 
Philippine people, their publication is a grave violation of 
the instructions given by President McKinley which re- 
quired that public functionaries should respect the sensi- 
bilities, beliefs, and sentiments of the Philippine people, 
and should show them consideration. The words and the 
conduct of Mr. Worcester tend to sow distrust be- 
tween the Americans and the Filipinos, whose aspira- 
tions and duties should not separate them but unite 
them in the pathway which leads to the progress and 
emancipation of the Philippine people. The influence 
of Mr. Worcester has caused injury to the feelings of 
the Filipinos, encouraged race hatred, and tended to frus- 
trate the task undertaken by men of real good will to win 
the esteem, confidence, and respect of the Philippine 
people for the Americans. 

Resolved further that this House desires that these facts 



" Non-Christian " Worcester 585 

should be communicated to the President of the United 
States through the Governor of the Philippines and the 
Secretary of War. 

Presumably these resolutions were forwarded "to 
the President of the United States through the Governor 
of the Philippines and the Secretary of War." But 
apparently they were pigeonholed when they reached 
Washington. I stumbled on them in the Insular Affairs 
Committee of the House of Representatives whither 
they had landed through Mr. Slay den of Texas. The 
distinguished veteran Congressman from Texas, being 
known as an enemy of all wrong things, was appealed 
to by certain persons in the United States to bring 
the matter to the attention of Congress. He did so by 
presenting to the House of Representatives an American 
petition which embodied a copy of the resolutions of 
the Philippine Assembly. 

It thus becomes apparent that one of Professor 
Worcester's principal elements of value is in bullying 
the Filipinos, and thereby smothering manifestations 
of a desire for independence, the existence of which 
desire is denied by President Taft's Administration. 
The more the Filipinos cry for independence the greater 
seems the sin of holding them in subjection. So that 
Professor Worcester is very valuable in silencing 
independence clamor and thereby creating an appear- 
ance of consent of the governed, when there is no 
consent of the governed whatsoever. 

In describing the discontent in distant provinces 
under brutal pro-consuls, which contributed largely 
to the final disintegration of the Roman Empire, 
Gibbon says : 

The cry of remote distress is ever faintly heard. 



586 American Occupation of Philippines 

The total failure of the above temperate, dignified, 
and vibrant protest of the Philippine Assembly to 
reach the ears of the American people is but another 
reminder that history repeats itself. 



CHAPTER XXIV 
The Philippine Civil Service 

Is our Occupation of the Philippines to be temporary, like our occu- 
pation of Cuba after the Spanish War, or "temporary" like the British 
Occupation of Egypt since 1882? The Unsettled Question. 

The policy to be pursued is for Congress to determine. I have no 
authority to speak for Congress in respect to the ultimate disposition 
of the Islands. 

Secretary of War Wm. H. Taft to Philippine Assembly, 1907. 

THE Act of Congress of July I, 1902, known as the 
Philippine Government Act, is entitled "An 
Act temporarily to provide" a government for the 
Philippine Islands. The young American who goes 
out to the Philippines to take a position with the 
Insular Government there has usually read his share 
of Kipling, and his imagination likes to analogize his 
prospective employment to the British Indian Civil 
Service. The latter, however, offers a career. But 
what does the former offer? Take the prospects of 
the rank and file, as set forth by Mr. J. R. Arnold, of 
the Executive Bureau of the Philippine Government, 
in an artic.e published in the North American Review 
for February, 191 2. Suppose a young man goes out 
to the Philippines at a salary of $1200. Mr. Arnold 
discusses fully and frankly the cost of living in the 
Islands, and how much higher board, lodging, etc.* 
are out there than in the United States. He states 

587 



588 American Occupation of Philippines 

that board and lodging will cost $15 to $20 a month 
more than here. So that, so far, a salary of $1200 in 
the Philippines would seem equivalent to a salary of 
say approximately $950 in the United States — say in 
Washington. Also he calls attention to the fact that 
the government will pay your way out, but you must 
get back the best way you can. He does not say so, 
but the walking is not good all the way from Manila 
to Washington. Seriously, according to the authority 
from whom we are quoting, it costs $225 to $300 to get 
back. So if you come back at the end of a three years' 
stay — you must contract to stay at least that long — 
you must have laid by, taking his maximum return 
fare as the more prudent figure to reckon on, one hun- 
dred dollars a year to buy your return ticket. Mr. 
Arnold does not say so, but it is a fact, that various 
little expenses will creep in that are sure to amount, 
even with the most rigidly frugal, to $50 per annum that 
you would never have spent in the United States. 
You are hardly respectable in the Philippines if you 
do not have a muchacho. Muchacho, in Spanish, 
means the same as gar con in French, or valet in English. 
But muchachos are as thick as cigarettes in the Philip- 
pines. And you can hire one for about $5 a month. 
To resolve not to have a muchacho in the Philippines 
would be like resolving at home never to have your 
shoes shined, or your clothes pressed. It would be 
contrary to the universal custom of the country, and 
would therefore be "impossible." You have not been 
long in the Philippines before you get tired of telling 
applicants for the position of muchacho that you do 
not want one, and, benumbed by the universal custom, 
you accept the last applicant. You must figure on a 
muchacho as one of your "fixed charges." Count 
then an extra $50 annual necessary expense that you 



The Philippine Civil Service 589 

would not have at home. If you do not succumb 
to the muchacho custom, you will get rid of the $50 
in other ways fairly classifiable as necessary current 
expenses. Thus, if you take from your $1200, worth 
$950 in Manila, as above stated, the $100 per annum 
necessary to be laid by against your home-coming, and 
the other $50 last suggested, your salary of $1200 per 
annum in Manila becomes equivalent to one of $800 
at home, so far as regards what you are likely to save 
by strict habits of economy. In other words, to figure 
how you are going to come out in the long run, if you 
go out as a $1200 man, while your social position will 
be precisely that of a man commanding the same salary 
in a government position in Washington, you must 
knock off a third of the $1200. This is not the way 
Mr. Arnold states the case exactly. I am simply 
taking his facts, supplemented by what little I have 
added, and stating them in a way which will perhaps 
illustrate the case better to some people. Mr. Arnold 
says you are apt to get up as high as $1500 and finally 
even to $1800 in three to five years. Suppose you do 
have that luck. Still, if, as has been made plain above, 
you must consider $1200 in Manila as equal to only 
$800 in Washington (so far as regards what you are 
going to be able to save each year), by the same token 
you must consider $1500 in Manila as being equal to 
only $1000 in Washington, and $1800 as only $1200. 

The utmost limit of achievement in the Philippine 
Government service, the only one of the higher positions 
not subject to political caprice, the only one regarded 
out there as a "life position" — and this excepts neither 
the Governorship of the Islands nor the Commissioner- 
ships — is the position of Justice of the Supreme Court. 
The salary is $10,000 per annum, American money. 
But there is not an American judge on that bench who 



59° American Occupation of Philippines 

would not be glad at any moment to accept a $5000 
position as a United States District Judge at home. 
All of them whom I know are most happily married. 
But I believe their wives would quit them if they re- 
fused such an offer from the President of the United 
States, or else get so unhappy about it that they would 
accept and come home. 

While we have now considered the case from bottom 
to top, we did not originally figure on the young Amer- 
can going out to the Philippines otherwise than single. 
In this behalf Mr. Arnold himself says : 

I do not think it can be fairly called other than risky 
for an American to attempt to practise love in a cottage in 
the Philippines. 

Says the late Arthur W. Fergusson — who gave his 
life to the Philippine Civil Service — in his annual 
report for 1905, as Executive Secretary: 

The one great stumbling-block, and which no legislative 
body can eradicate, is the fact that very few Americans intend to 
make the Philippines their permanent home, or even stay here 
for any extended period. This is doubtless due to the loca- 
tion of the islands, their isolation from centres of civilization 
and culture, the enervating climate, lack of entertainment 
and desirable companionship, and distance from the home- 
land. Every clerk, no matter what his ideals or aspirations, 
realizes after coming here that he must at some time in the 
future return to the United States and begin all over again. 
After spending a year or more in the islands, the realization 
that the sooner the change is made the better, becomes 
more acute. This condition causes, doubtless, the class 
of men who are not adventurous or fond of visiting strange 
climes to think twice before accepting an appointment for 
service in these islands, and generally to remain away, and a 



The Philippine Civil Service 591 

great majority of those who do come here to leave the ser- 
vice again after a very short period of duty. 1 

Then Mr. Fergusson comes to the obvious but ap- 
parently unattainable remedy, which he says is 

to make a Philippine appointment a permanent means 
of livelihood by providing an effective system of transfers 
to the Federal service after a reasonable period of service 
here. * * * Under the present regulations influence must 
be brought to bear at Washington in order that requisition 
may be made by the Chief of some bureau there for the 
services of a clerk desiring to transfer. 

You see, if a Washington Bureau, say the Coast and 
Geodetic Survey, or the Geological Survey, sends a 
man out to the Islands, he is never for a moment 
separated from the Federal Civil Service or the Federal 
Government's pay-roll. The same is true of civilian 
employees of the army. But the man in the Insular 
Service, when he wants to get back home, is little 
better off than if he were in the employ of the Cuban 
Government, or the British Indian Government, or 
that of the Dutch East Indies. Mr. Fergusson also 
says: 

It is believed to be useless to try to influence men to 
come out here unless there is something permanent offered 
to them at the expiration of a reasonable term of service - 
* * * The average European is content to live and die " east 
of Suez 1 ' ; the average American is not. * * * I am firmly 
convinced that a permanent service under present conditions 
is entirely out of the question. 

How can you have "a permanent service" unless 
you have a definite declared policy? Why not declare 

1 See Report U. S. Philippine Commission, 1905, pt. 1, p. 89 et seg. 



59 2 American Occupation of Philippines 

the purpose of our Government with the regard to the 
Islands? 

In his annual report for 1906 1 Mr. Fergusson says: 

Our relations to the islands are such that the education 
and specialization of a distinct body of high class men pur- 
posely for this service as is done in England for the Indian 
service, will probably be always a practical impossibility. 

He then goes on to reiterate his annual plea for a 
law providing for transfer as a matter of right, not of 
influence, from the Philippine Civil Service to the 
Federal Civil Service in the United States, and tells 
of a very capable official of his bureau who got a chance 
during the year just closed to transfer from the Philip- 
pines to a $1400 government position in the United 
States, and was glad to get it, although $1400 was 
"considerably less than half what he received here." 
Mr. Fergusson quickly gives the key to all this in what 
he calls "the haunting fear of having to return to the 
States in debilitated health and out of touch with existent 
conditions, only to face the necessity of seeking a new 
position. ' ' He adds : 

That this is not a mere theory is proven by the number 
of army (civilian) employees who contentedly remain 
year after year. 

In 1907, Mr. Fergusson reports on the same subject 2 : 
"Matters do not seem to be improving, " and that the 
Director of the Insular Civil Service informs him that 
"during the fiscal year there were five hundred voluntary 
separations from the service by Americans, of whom one 
hundred were college graduates." He adds: "When 
the expense of getting and bringing out new men, and 

1 Report Philippine Commission, 1906, pt. I, p. 99. 

3 U. S. Philippine Commission Report, 1907, pt. 1, p. 149." 



The Philippine Civil Service 593 

of training them to their new work is considered, the 
wastefulness of the present system is evident." 

You do not find any quotations from any of the 
Fergusson disclosures in Mr. Arnold's North American 
Review article. He would probably have lost his job, 
if he had quoted them. Yet the evils pointed out by 
Mr. Fergusson come from one permanent source, the 
uncertainty of the future of every American out there, 
due to the failure of Congress to declare the purpose 
of the Government. 

On January 30, 1908, Arthur W. Fergusson died in 
the service of the Philippine Government. No general 
law putting that service on the basis he pleaded for to 
the day of his death has ever yet been passed. Since 
his death, his tactful successor appears to have aban- 
doned further plead ng, and concluded to worry along 
with the permanently lame conditions inherent in the 
uncertainty as to whether we are to keep the Islands 
permanently or not, rather than embarrass President 
Taft by discouraging young Americans from going to 
the Islands. 

The report of the Governor- General of the Philip- 
pines for 1907, Governor Smith, says 1 : 

American officials and employees have rarely made up their 
minds to cast their fortunes definitely with the Philippines or 
to make governmental service in the tropics a career. Many 
of those who in the beginning were so minded, due to ill 
health or the longing to return to friends or relatives, 
changed front and preferred to return to the home land, 
there to enjoy life at half the salary in the environment 
to which they were accustomed. * * * That which oper- 
ates probably more than anything else to induce good men 
drawing good salaries to abandon the service * * * is 
the knowledge that they have nothing to look forward to 

x See Report Philippine Commission for 1907, pt. 1, p. 80. 
38 



594 American Occupation of Philippines 

when broken health or old age shall have rendered them 
valueless to the government. 

If Congress should ever care to do anything to im- 
prove the Philippine Civil Service and the status of 
Americans entering the same, certainly the one su- 
premely obvious thing to do is to make transfer back 
to the civil service in the United States after a term of 
duty in the Islands a matter of right. 



CHAPTER XXV 
Cost of the Philippines 

If 't were well to do right, 't were better still if 't were more profitable. 

Cynic Maxims. 

GENERAL OTIS'S annual report for 1899, x dated 
August 31st, gives the number of Americans 
killed in battle in the Philippines, from the beginning 
of the American occupation to that date, as 380. 
This includes those wounded who afterwards died of 
such wounds. His report for 1900, 2 covering the period 
from his 1899 report to May 5, 1900, gives the number 
of Americans killed in battle from August 31, 1899, to 
May 1, 1900, as 258. General MacArthur succeeded 
General Otis in command of the American forces in 
the Philippines on May 5, 1900. General MacArthur 's 
annual report for 1901, 3 gives the number of Americans 
killed in battle between May 5, 1900, and June 30, 
1901, as 245. Thus the total number of Americans 
killed in battle up to the time the Civil Government 
was set up in 1901, was 883. The military reports 
do not always give the insurgents killed during the 
periods they cover. But on June 4, 1900, as we saw 
in a previous chapter, General MacArthur reported 
the number of Filipinos killed up to that time, so far 
as our records showed, to be something over 10,000. 

1 War Department Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 142. 

2 Ibid., pp. 559-56o. 

3 See War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 98. 

595 



596 American Occupation of Philippines 

General MacArthur's report, above quoted, giving our 
killed for the period it covers (May 5, 1900, to June 30, 
1901), at 245, gives the insurgent killed for the same 
period as 3854. If we add this 3854 to the 10,000 killed 
up to about where May merged into June in 1900, 
we have 13,854 Filipinos killed up to the time Judge 
Taft was inaugurated as Governor, in 1901. There 
was no record, of course, obtainable or attempted, by 
the Eighth Army Corps, of Filipinos who were wounded 
and not captured and who subsequently died. It is 
quite safe to assume that such fatalities must have 
swelled the enemy's list up to the time of the setting 
up of the Civil Government far above 16,000 killed. 
Thus, as has heretofore been stated, the ratio of the 
enemy's loss to our loss was, literally, at least 16 to 1, 
up to the time the civil government was set up. 
General MacArthur's report for 1900 1 would seem to 
bear out the above ratio. He there gives the number 
of our killed, from November 1, 1899, to September 1, 
1900, including the wounded who afterwards died of 
such wounds, at 268, and the Filipino killed, ''as far 
as of record, " 3227. While these last figures make our 
killed for the period they relate to, considerably over 
200, and the enemy's killed but a very small figure over 
3200, still, making allowances for the enemy's wounded 
that died afterwards, of which of course we have no 
record, the 16 to 1 ratio would seem to give a fairly 
accurate probable estimate of the relative loss of life. 
These figures are explained by the facts, already 
noticed hereinbefore, that most of our people knew how 
to shoot and the Filipinos did not. The great part 
of their army were raw recruits who did not understand 
the use of two sights on a rifle, and frequently relied 
solely on the one at the muzzle, not even lifting up the 

1 War Department Report, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 60. 



Cost of the Philippines 597 

sight near the lock which when not in use lies flat along 
the gun-barrel, with the result that they almost invari- 
ably got the range too high and shot over our heads. 

Because the military reports overlap each other in 
many instances, it is not possible to state accurately 
how many men the Eighth Army Corps lost by disease, 
but our loss chargeable to this account was not far 
from our fatalities on the battlefield. x 

It is not possible to even approximat A the enemy's 
loss other than on the battlefield. The United States 
Coast and Geodetic Survey Philippine Atlas gives the 
table estimating the population of the various provinces 
of the Philippine archipelago prior to the American 
occupation. This estimate gives the population of 
Batangas province at 312,192. The American Census 
of the Philippines of ipoj gives the population of 
Batangas province at 257,715. 2 This would present a 
difference in the population of Batangas prior to 1898 
and its population after the war of 54,477. The 
provincial secretary of Batangas province made a 
report to Governor Taft on December 18, 1901 3 on 
the condition of the province generally. This report, 
as it appears in the Senate Document, is a translation 
from the Spanish. The portion which relates to the 
reduction of the population of Batangas province 
reads as follows: 

The mortality, caused no longer by the war, but by 
disease, such as malaria and dysentery, has reduced 
to a little over 200,000 the more than 300,000 inhabitants 
which in former years the province had. 

x From July 31, 1898, to May 24, 1900, we lost 1138 men by disease. 
See special report of the Surgeon -General of the Army, Senate Docu- 
ment 426, 56th Cong., 1st Sess. By the middle of 1900 our soldiers had 
pretty well learned how to take care of themselves in the tropics. 

2 See vol. ii., p. 102. 3 See Senate Document 331, 1902, p. 887. 



598 American Occupation of Philippines 

Of course these appalling figures 1 must be taken with 
a grain of salt. In the first place, the man who fur- 
nished them was merely reproducing the general im- 
pression of his neighbors as to the diminution of the 
population of the province. He does not pretend to 
be dealing with official statistics. On the other hand, 
all of the yearly reports of the various native provincial 
officers are, as a general rule, pathetically optimistic. 
They all seem to think it their duty to present a hopeful 
view of the situation. In fact if you read these reports 
one after the other, the various signers seem to vie with 
one another in optimism as if their tenure of office 
depended upon it. So that, balancing probabilities, 
it would seem unlikely that the provincial secretary 
of Batangas would have stated more than what he at 
least believed to represent actual conditions, and the 
results of the war. A comparison of the Atlas popula- 
tion tables above mentioned with the census tables 
of 1903 shows no very startling difference in the popu- 
lation of any of the other provinces of the archipelago 
before and after the war except Batangas. It is also 
notorious that Batangas suffered by the war more than 
any other province in the Philippine Islands. However, a 
glance at the table of population of the various provinces 
of the Census of 1903 1 shows you fifty provinces with 
a total of 7,635,426 people. While we will never know 
whether Batangas did or did not lose one hundred 
thousand as a result of the war and its consequences, 
still, if it did, the other forty-nine provinces above 
mentioned must have lost as many more, that is to say, 
must have lost another hundred thousand. So that 
while it is all a matter of surmise, with nothing more 

1 Appalling, because there are forty-nine other provinces besides 
Batangas. 

1 Vol. ii., p. 123. 



Cost of the Philippines 599 

certain to go on than the foregoing, it would really 
seem by no means absurd to assume the Filipino lo s 
of life, other than on the battlefield, caused by the war, 
and the famine, pestilence, and other disease consequent 
thereon, at not far from 200,000 people. In more than 
one province, the people died like flies, especially the 
women and children, as a result of conditions incident 
to and consequent upon the war. This will not seem 
an over-statement to men who have lived much among 
people that do not know much about how to take care 
of themselves in the midst of great calamities, people 
who will eat meat of animals carried off by disease, in 
time of famine ; who will drink water contaminated by 
what may for euphony be called sewage; and who are 
unprovided with any save traditional home remedies 
against cholera, small-pox, etc. 

As to the cost of the Philippines in money, it used 
to be said in the early days that we paid $20,000,000 
for a $200,000,000 insurrection. Just what the Islands 
have cost us up to date in money it is utterly impossible 
to figure out with any degree of certainty, except that 
a safe minimum may be arrived at. Said the distin- 
guished Congressman from Texas, Honorable James L. 
Slayden, in a speech which appears in the Congressional 
Record of February 25, 1908 (pp. 2532 et seq.) : 

On this point, and in reply to a resolution of the Senate 
in 1902, the Secretary of War reported that the cost of the 
army in the Philippines from June 30, 1898, to July 1, 1902, 
had been $169,853,512.00. To this let us add $114,515,- 
643.00, the admitted cost of the army in the Philippines 
from May 1, 1902, to June 30, 1907, and we will have a 
grand total of $284,369,155.00. That does not take into 
account the additional cost of the navy. 

Nor, be it noted, does it count the $20,000,000 we 



600 American Occupation of Philippines 

paid Spain for the Islands, which item, is, however 
included in another part of Mr. Slayden's speech. 

The only other estimate of what the Islands have 
cost, made in the last few years, which seems to be 
specially worthy of consideration, is one which appeared 
in the New York Evening Post of March 6, 1907. This 
estimate was prepared by one of the best trained and 
most conservative newspaper men in the United States, 
Mr. Edward G. Lowry, then Washington correspondent 
of the Evening Post, and since 191 1, its managing editor. 
The total which Mr. Lowry arrives at is $308,369,155, 
up to that time. There have been various absurd 
estimates made recklessly without knowledge, but Mr. 
Lowry 's estimate is very carefully studied out, and 
presented in detail in the newspaper referred to. From 
the testimony of Mr, Slayden and Mr. Lowry, given 
as a result of their inquiries into the matter, it would 
thus seem that the Islands must have cost us by the 
end of 1907 something like $300,000,000. The Insular 
Government is now self-sustaining, except as to military 
affairs. 

The cost per annum of the Philippine (native) scouts, 
of which there are 4000, is paid out of the United States 
Treasury, and amounts to $2,000,000 per annum. 1 
The number of American troops in the islands for the 
last few years has been about 12,000. Those who are 
wedded to the present Philippine policy of indefinite 
retention with undeclared intention, insist that our 
military expenses in the Philippines, in respect to the 
regular army out there, are not fairly chargeable as a 
part of the current expenses of the Philippine occupa- 

1 See page 78 of the special report of the Secretary of War Taft on 
the Philippines, January 23, 1908, transmitted by President Roosevelt 
to Congress, January 27, 1908, Senate Document 200, 60th Cong., 
1st Sess. 



Cost of the Philippines 601 

tion. This argument must be admitted to have some 
force as far as the navy is concerned, but as to the 
army it is clearly without merit. Under the Act of 
Congress reorganizing the army of the United States 
after the Spanish War, provision was made for a skele- 
ton army of about 60,000 men capable of expansion 
to something like 100,000 in time of war. The method 
of expansion thus contemplated was to have companies 
of, say, for illustration, sixty men, in time of peace, 
which companies could be recruited up to a war footing 
of one hundred men, in time of war. The suggestion that 
the cost of the part of the regular army which we have to 
keep in the Philippines is not chargeable to the Philip- 
pines because those same troops would have to be 
somewhere in the United States if they were not where 
they are, is not well taken. If we did not need 12,000 
men continually in the Philippines, the army could be 
at once reduced by that much without affecting its 
present organization. If we had no troops in the 
Philippines this would not mean the absolute elimina- 
tion from the army of enough regiments to represent 
twelve thousand men. It would not eliminate any 
existing organization. It would simply mean contrac- 
tion of the number of men in the several companies of 
the several regiments of the army toward a peace basis 
to the extent of a total of twelve thousand men, more 
or less. The War Department has long figured on the 
cost of an American soldier in the Philippines per annum 
including his pay, allowances, and transportation out 
and back, at $1000 per annum. The cost of 12,000 
soldiers at $1000 per annum is $12,000,000, per 
annum. The conclusion would, therefore, seem in- 
evitable that the extra military current expense charge- 
able to our occupation of the Philippines is $12,000,000, 
per annum, outside the Philippine scouts, or, a total 



602 American Occupation of Philippines 

of $14,000,000. Even if the Philippines have cost 
us $300,000,000, that is no reason why we should 
continue to run a kindergarten for adults out there, 
and let the Monroe Doctrine run to seed. "Some- 
thing" is not " bound to turn up." The Philippine 
Islands will not prove a blessing in disguise. In every 
war with a nation having discontented colonial subjects, 
the enemy will always strike the colony first, and hope 
for aid from the inhabitants thereof. 

Even if the Philippines have cost us $300,000,000, 
w r e are a nation of nearly 100,000,000 people. So 
they have cost us, all told, in the neighborhood of only 
about $3 a piece. And we subjugated them by mis- 
take, after freeing a less capable people, the Cubans. 

The Panama Canal is to be finished in 19 13. This 
means a splendid, but free-for-all contest, for the trade 
of South America. In South America we will meet a 
tremendous pro- German sentiment, and a by no means 
inconsiderable anti-" Yankee" sentiment. The bigger 
Germany's army and navy grows, the more she will 
loom up as the one great menace to the peace of the 
world, and the one avowed enemy of the Monroe 
Doctrine. We need to build up a Pan-American esprit 
de corps, based on the instinct of self-defence. We 
must win the good will of South America, and we cannot 
do it so long as we insist, in another part of the world, 
upon the righteousness of the principle of one Christian 
people policing a weaker Christian people, ostensibly 
to keep them from having revolutions, and really in 
the hope of ultimate profit. To free the Filipinos 
should be the first step we take after the Panama Canal 
is completed toward getting ourselves foot-loose en- 
tirely, with a view of getting everything from the 
Canadian border to the Argentine wheat fields and 
beyond, solidly and sincerely for the Monroe Doctrine. 



Cost of the Philippines 603 

In that direction lies our only sensible and reasonable 
hope that the canal will get for us the trade and friend- 
ship of South America. With such tremendous issues 
at stake, what does it matter to the richest nation on 
earth what the Philippines cost? What does it matter, 
anyhow, how much it costs to do right? 



CHAPTER XXVI 
Congressional Legislation 

Taxation without representation is good cause for revolt. 

American Speech of 1776. 

AS a colony of Spain the Philippines enjoyed certain 
special privileges in the way of trade with the 
"mother country." When at the beginning of our 
military occupation in 1898 General Otis detailed an 
army officer to take charge of the Customs House, he 
continued for the time being the Spanish tariff laws 
concerning imports and exports. On September 17, 
1 90 1, the Philippine Commission passed a tariff act 1 
fixing the duties on imports into the Islands and also 
continuing to a considerable extent the system of duties 
on Philippine exports inherited from the Spanish regime. 
Among the products of the Philippine Islands on which 
the Act of September 17, 1901, imposed an export tax 
were the following : 

Hemp, 75c. per 100 kilos 2 ; sugar, 5c. per 100 kilos; manu- 
factured tobacco, $1.50 per 100 kilos; raw tobacco, $1.50 
down to 75c. per 100 kilos. 3 

1 Act 230, U. S. Philippine Commission. 

2 For the convenience of readers who do not constantly use the metric 
system: A kilo is about 225 lbs. 

3 According to what part of archipelago grown. 

604 



Congressional Legislation 605 

On March 8, 1902, the United States Congress 
passed an Act, "temporarily to provide revenue for 
the Philippine Islands and for other purposes." The 
Act of 1902 re-enacted the Commission's tariff law for 
the Philippines of September 17, 1901, with one change, 
hereinafter to be discussed, as to its export tax features. 
As to the tariffs to be collected at our custom-houses 
on Philippine products shipped to the United States, 
the Act of 1902 reduced the rates fixed by the Dingley 
tariff to seventy-five per cent, of said rates. That was 
all Congress did in the way of lowering our tariff wall to 
Philippine products until 1909, when the Payne- Aldrich 
tariff bill became a law. This twenty-five per cent, 
reduction was no better than no reduction whatever 
would have been. 

Governor Taft pleaded very earnestly with Congress, 
at the time of the passage of the Philippine Tariff 
Act of March 8, 1902, for a substantial reduction of the 
Dingley tariff rate on sugar and tobacco, so as to give 
his "constituents" — his Filipinos — something in lieu 
of the markets they had had under Spain. But our sugar 
and tobacco interests defeated his efforts, because 
they feared what they termed "competition with cheap 
Asiatic labor. " 

The Act of Congress of March 8, 1902, repealed the 
export duties imposed by the Act of the Philippine 
Commission of September 17, 1901, as to exports to 
the United States, leaving unrepealed, however, the 
export duty on Philippine products shipped to foreign 
countries. Section 2 of said Act of 1902 provided, as 
to exports from the Philippines to the United States, 
that the rates of duty upon products of the Philippine 
Archipelago coming into the United States, should be 
less any duty or tax levied, collected, and paid thereon 
(under the Act of the Philippine Commission of Sep- 



6o6 American Occupation of Philippines 

tember 17, 1901, aforesaid) upon the shipment thereof 
from the Philippine Archipelago. This sounds liberal 
enough. It is, as far as it goes. But what those 
familiar with the hemp infamy of the Act of 1902 call 
"the joker" in it, is as follows: 

All articles, the growth and product of the Philippine 
Islands, admitted into the ports of the United States free 
of duty under the provisions of this act, and coming directly 
from said islands to the United States, for use and consump- 
tion therein, shall be hereafter exempt from any export 
duties imposed in the Philippine Islands. 

This also sounds liberal, on first reading, but its 
object was, and its effect has been, to enable the Ameri- 
can Hemp Trust to corner and control the Manila 
hemp industry. There is but one article of Philippine 
export which any one in the United States is interested in, 
that was admitted into the United States free of duty under 
the Dingley Act. 1 That article is hemp. The object 
of the law was to favor Americans interested in export- 
ing hemp from Manila to the United States as against 
Europeans exporting it to England and other foreign 
countries. This does not look, on its face, either un- 
patriotic or un-Christian. It is not unpatriotic or 
un-Christian, ordinarily, to favor your own people, 
as against their foreign competitors. The moral 
quality of such favoritism, however, must depend on 
who is to pay for it. Under the Act of 1902, the 
Manila authorities have always collected an export 
tax on hemp coming to the United States, just as they 
do on hemp going from Manila to foreign countries, 
exactly as if the law abolishing the export tax on hemp 
coming to the United States had never been passed. 
Later, on proof that the hemp was in fact carried to 

1 The Payne law of 1909 continued the export tax, etc. 



Congressional Legislation 607 

the United States and used and consumed therein, 
they refund the export tax. This is on the idea that 
they cannot tell where the hemp is going to until they 
know where it went to, nor where it is going to be 
"used and consumed" until they know where it was in 
fact finally "used and consumed." Of course the 
small farmer is in no position to follow his bale of hemp 
into the markets of the world and show, if it happens 
to go to the United States, that it did in fact go there 
and that it was there "used and consumed," and, 
finally obtaining the proof of this, submit it to the 
Manila Government and get his little export tax on his 
bale of hemp refunded. Only the big bu}fer's agents 
at Manila are in a position to do this. So the hemp 
crop is bought and moved under conditions which are 
the same as if all hemp were subject to an export tax. 
And only the big fish get the benefit. For instance, 
the International Harvester Company has its hemp 
buyers at Manila. And as to the part of the Philip- 
pine hemp crop it handles, it can, of course, follow the 
hemp to its ultimate consumption in the United States, 
make the proof, and get the refund. 

The wealth of the Philippines is practically entirely 
agricultural. Neither mining nor manufactures cut 
any appreciable figure. Hemp, sugar, tobacco, and 
copra 1 are the chief staples and main exports, and of 
the first of these Secretary of War Taft says in one of 
his reports: 2 

The chief export in value and quantity from the Philip- 
pines is Manila hemp, it amounting to between 60 and 65 
per cent, of the total exports, 

1 Dried cocoa-nut meat, used to make soaps and oils. I do not deal 
with copra because it nearly all goes to Europe, principal^ to Marseilles. 

2 Senate Document 200, 1908, Sixtieth Congress, First Session. 



6o8 American Occupation of Philippines 

Let us see just how far, according to the annual 
reports of our own agents in the Philippines— those 
charged by us with governing them, — this piece of legis- 
lation gotten through by " special privilege' ' has 
depressed the Manila hemp industry, the chief source 
of wealth of the Islands. And before, we even get to 
the main trouble, let us permit the Insular Government 
to " place on the screen," as a preliminary "view," 
a glance at what the instinct of self-preservation of 
American sugar and tobacco interests, fearing competi- 
tion from ''cheap Asiatic labor, " have deemed it neces- 
sary to do to the Philippine sugar and tobacco industries, 
through the Dingley tariff. The annual report of the 
Philippine Commission for 1904, before it gets to the 
subject of hemp, draws a most gloomy picture of how 
we killed the markets for sugar and tobacco the Islands 
had under Spain, and gave them none instead. They 
speak of "the languishing state of these industries" 
(p. 26), and describe a state of affairs that sounds more 
like Egypt under Pharaoh than anything else, in- 
cluding a cattle disease that carried off ninety per cent. 
of the beasts of burden of the country, and wholesale 
destruction of crops by locusts. x What they have to 
say of the annual tribute levied by the American Hemp 
Trust, through Congress, on the Manila hemp industry, 
should not be re-stated, but quoted. They say: 2 

We desire to call attention to the injustice effected upon 
the revenues of the islands by section 2 of the Act of Con- 
gress approved March 8, 1902, which provides that the 
Philippine Government shall refund all export duties 
imposed upon articles exported from the islands into and 
consumed in the United States. Under the provisions of 
this section there has been collected in the Philippine 

1 1 have myself seen a cloud of locusts three miles long. 

2 Report. U. S. Philippine Commission, 1904, pt. 1, pp. 26-7. 



Congressional Legislation 609 

Islands, since its enactment down to the close of the fiscal 
year 1904, the sum of $1,060,460.20 United States currency, 
which is refundable. These refundable duties are princi- 
pally upon hemp exportations to the United States, and are 
in effect a gift of that amount to the manufacturers of the 
United States who use hemp in their operations. 

They add: 

It is manifestly a discrimination in favor of our manufac- 
turers as against those of foreign countries. No good reason 
is perceived why this bounty to American manufacturers 
should be extracted from the treasury of the Philippine 
Islands, and it is respectfully submitted that the law 
authorizing it should be repealed. 

The annual report of the Philippine Commission 
for 1905, after the usual complaint about being made 
a political football by Benevolent Assimilation on the 
one side, and Louisiana and our sugar-beet States on 
the other, and the usual annual and true description 
of the consequent poverty, says concerning hemp : 

We have several times in our reports called attention to 
the practical workings of that portion of the Act of Congress 
approved March 8, 1902, which provides for the refund of 
duties paid on articles exported from the Philippine Islands 
to the United States and consumed therein, and have as 
repeatedly recommended its repeal. It is a direct burden 
upon the people of the Philippine Islands, because it takes 
from the insular treasury export duties collected from the 
people and gives them to manufacturers of hemp products in 
the United States. These manufacturers were already 
prosperous before this bounty was given them and it seems 
hardly consistent with our expressions of purpose to build up 
and develop the Philippine Islands when we are thus en- 
riching a few of our own people at their expense. 1 

1 Report, U. S. Philippine Commission, 1905, pt. 1, pp. 72-3. 
39 



610 American Occupation of Philippines 

By the end of the fiscal year 1905 (June 30), the 
American importers of Manila hemp — of whom the 
International Harvester Company and its allied inter- 
ests are the most influential — had, under the operation 
of the rebate system based on the Act of 1902, milked 
the Philippine people to the tune of about $1,000,000. 
Says the Philippine Commission's annual report for 
1905, immediately after the passage last above quoted: 

The amount of duties refunded under this act to manu- 
facturers in the United States during the three years ending 
June 30, 1905, is $1,057,251.12. Many of the departments 
of the government are much hampered in their operations 
because of the lack of funds, notably the bureau of educa- 
tion, and were the sum thus taken available for educational 
purposes, to say nothing of any other, the government 
would be enabled to give instruction to thousands of 
Filipino children whom they are now unable to reach and 
who must remain steeped in ignorance because of the lack 
of funds to provide such instruction. 

Said the Manila Chamber of Commerce to the Taft 
Congressional party in August, 1905: "The country 
is in a state of financial collapse." 1 

Says the Philippine Commission's report for 1906 
(pt. 1, p. 68): 

The Commission has repeatedly called attention in its 
reports to the action of Congress providing for a refund of 
duties paid on articles exported from the Islands to the 
United States and consumed therein. The reasons that 
led the Commission heretofore to recommend the repeal of 
that provision are still operative. Since the passage of 
that act on March 8, 1902, the amount of duties collected 
and paid into the Philippine treasury and handed over to 

1 Senator Newlands, North American Review, December, 1905 
Senator Newlands was one of the party. 



Congressional Legislation 61 1 

manufacturers in the United States down to June 30, 1906, 
is $1,471,208.47. This money has been taken out of the 
poverty of the insular treasury to be delivered directly into the 
hands of manufacturers of cordage and other users of Philip- 
pine hemp in the United States for their enrichment. The 
cordage interests are prosperous and do not need this help ; 
the Philippine Islands are poor. Legislation which takes 
money directly from the Philippine treasury and passes it 
over to a particular industry in the United States is not 
founded on sound principles of political economy or of 
justice to the Filipinos. We renew our recommendation 
for the repeal of this provision. 

You also find in the Commission's report for 1906 
the usual annual protests against the Dingley tariff 
on Philippine sugar and tobacco. Said the Honorable 
Henry C. Ide in an article in the New York Independent 
for November 22, 1906, written shortly after he retired 
from the office of Governor-General of the Philippines 
and returned to the United States: "By annexation 
we killed the Spanish market for Philippine sugar and 
tobacco, and our tariff shuts these products from the 
United States market, and to-day both these [in- 
dustries] are practically prostrated." In their annual 
report for 1907, the Philippine Commission say with 
regard to the American corner on Philippine hemp: 1 
"The price of hemp has fallen from an average of twenty 
pesos ($10 American money) per picul 2 to thirteen 
pesos per picul." It thus appears that by judicious 
manipulation of the hemp market at Manila, through 
the leverage of the refund system, based on collection 
and subsequent refunding of the export tax on hemp 
coming to the United States, the Manila agents of the 
American hemp manufacturers had, as early as 1907, 
beat the price of hemp down to not far above half of 

1 Part 1, p. 99. 2 1373^ lbs. 



612 American Occupation of Philippines 

what it had been formerly. To-day (191 2) the Filipino 
hemp farmer gets for his hemp just one half what he 
got just ten years ago. During all this period of 
economic depression, the public utterances and State 
papers both of President Roosevelt and Mr. Taft 
are full of such preposterous stuff as the following: 

No great civilized power has ever managed with such 
wisdom and disinterestedness the affairs of a people com- 
mitted by the accident of war to its hands. 1 

This is what Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft were 
publicly pretending to believe. But at practically 
the same time, during as dark a year, economically, 
as the American occupation has seen, 1907, let us see 
what they were privately admitting to their intimate 
friends. 

In the North American Review for January 18, 1907, 
in an article contributed to that Review by the author 
of this volume, our treatment of the Philippine people, 
through our Congress, was briefly discussed. The article 
chanced to attract the attention of Mr. Andrew Carne- 
gie, who gave a considerable sum of money to have it 
reprinted and distributed. Some correspondence fol- 
lowed between us, in the course of which Mr. Carnegie 
stated that he had been at the White House shortly 
before writing me, and described what happened as 
follows : 

When at supper with the President [Mr. Roosevelt] 
recently, pointing to Judge Taft [then Secretary of War], 
who sat opposite, he [President Roosevelt] said: "Here 
are the two men in all the world most anxious to get out 
of the Philippines." 

1 President Roosevelt's message to Congress of January 27, 1908, 
transmitting report of Secretary of War Taft on the Philippines. 



Congressional Legislation 613 

In another letter Mr. Carnegie described this same 
incident, this other letter's version of President Roose- 
velt's supper- table remark being: 

Here are the two men in America most anxious to get 
rid of them [the Philippines]. 1 

Now why all this public boasting about our "dis- 
interestedness, " when, if he had been a Filipino, Colonel 
Roosevelt would probably have hunted up all the 
American speeches of 1776 about taxation without 
representation, and played hide-and-seek with the 
public prosecutor at Manila, to see how far he could 
violate the sedition statute without getting in jail? 
And why this private admission to his friend Mr. 
Carnegie, which neither he nor Mr. Taft has ever 
publicly made? Why did he not send a message to 
Congress showing up the hemp rebate system? Simply 
because to do so would lose support for the Adminis- 
tration, would alienate powerful interests from the 
fatuous policy of Benevolent Assimilation bequeathed 
to Mr. Roosevelt by Mr. McKinley. His party was 
irrevocably committed to indefinite retention of the 
Islands. It was like Lot's wife. It could not turn 
back. So the protected and subsidized interests were 
permitted to continue to prey upon the Philippine 
people. Tariff evils were never President Roose- 
velt's specialty. Nor has war against intrenched 
privilege of any sort ever been Mr. Taft's specialty. 
Mr. Taft went out to the Philippines in 1907 to open 
the Philippine Assembly. In 1908 he came back and 
made a report to President Roosevelt which is as bland 
as his Winona declaration that the Payne-Aldrich bill 

1 Before assuming to use these letters in this book, I sent them to 
Mr. Carnegie and asked his permission to so use them. He returned 
them to me with his consent entered on the back of one of them. 



614 American Occupation of Philippines 

is " the best tariff bill the Republican party ever passed." 
It makes the American reader's heart swell with pious 
pride at what he is doing for his " little brown brother," 
in the matter of vaccination, sewers, school-books, 
and the like. President Roosevelt sent this report to 
Congress, accompanied by a message, from which we 
have already quoted. In that same message he said: 

I question whether there is a brighter page in the annals 
of international dealing between the strong and the weak 
than the page which tells of our doings in the Philippines. 

Apparently, Messrs. Roosevelt and Taft thought, in 
1907, that granting the Filipinos a little debating society 
solemnly called a legislative body, but wholly without 
any real power, was ample compensation for deserted 
tobacco and cane plantations and for the price of hemp 
being beat down below the cost of production by man- 
ipulation through an Act of Congress passed for the 
benefit of American hemp manufacturers. If we had 
had a Cleveland in the White House about that time, 
he would have written an essay on taxation without 
representation, with the hemp infamy of this Philippine 
Tariff Act of 1902 as a text, and sent it to Congress as 
a message demanding the repeal of the Act. But the 
good-will of the Hemp Trust is an asset for the policy 
of Benevolent Assimilation. The Filipino cannot vote, 
and the cordage manufacturer in the United States 
can. No conceivable state of economic desolation to 
which we might reduce the people of the Philippine 
Islands being other than a blessing in disguise compared 
with permitting them to attend to their own affairs 
after their own quaint and mutually considerate fashion, 
the Hemp Trust's rope, tied into a slip-knot by the 
Act of 1902, must not be removed from their throats. 
By judicious manipulation of sufficient hemp rope, 



Congressional Legislation 615 

you can corral much support for Benevolent Assimila- 
tion. Therefore, to this good hour, the substance of 
the hemp part of the Philippine Tariff Act of March 
8, 1902, remains upon the statute books of the United 
States, to the shame of the nation. 

At last, under the Payne tariff law of 1909, Mr. 
Taft's long and patient quiet work with Congressional 
committees prevailed upon Congress and the interests 
to admit Philippine sugar and tobacco to this country 
free of duty, up to amounts limited in the Act. T Since 
then you find the reports of our American officials in 
the Philippines palpitating with gratitude to Congress. 
As a matter of fact all Congress had said to the Filipinos 
by its action may be summed up about thus: "The 
sugar and tobacco interests of this country have at last 
realized that such little of the sugar and tobacco you 
raise as may stray over to this side of the world will not 
be in the least likely to hurt them. Therefore they have 
graciously decided, in their benignity, to permit you to 
live, provided you do not get too prosperous. " But this 
very same Payne bill continued the export tax features of 
the Act of 1902. Section 13 of the Payne bill is as follows : 

Section 13. That upon the exportation to any foreign 
country from the Philippine Islands, or the shipment there- 
of to the United States or any of its possessions, of the 
following articles there shall be levied, collected, and paid 
thereon the following export duties: Provided, however, 
That all articles the growth and product of the Philippine 
Islands coming directly from said islands, to the United 
States or any of its possessions for use and consumption 
therein shall be exempt from any export duties imposed in 
the Philippine Islands : 

352. Abaca (hemp), gross weight, 100 kilos, 75 cents. 

353. Sugar, gross weight, 100 kilos, 5 cents. 

1 300,000 tons of sugar, 150,000,000 cigars, etc. 



616 American Occupation of Philippines 

354. Copra, gross weight, 100 kilos, 10 cents. 

355. Tobacco, gross weight: 

(a) Manufactured or unmanufactured, except as other- 
wise provided, 100 kilos, $1.30. 

(b) Stems, clippings, and other wastes of tobacco, 100 
kilos, 50 cents. 

Let us briefly glance at the net results of this law, 
and its predecessor, the Act of 1902, the export features 
of which it re-enacted. It is important that every 
fair-minded American who can possibly spare the time 
should take such a glance at what Congress has done 
to the Philippine hemp industry, because of the obvious 
bearing that such taxation without representation will 
probably have on the attitude of the Philippine people 
whenever we get into a war with a foreign power. 
Certainly the legislation Congress has perpetrated upon 
them, at the behest of special interests in the United 
States, has not soothed the original desire of those people 
to be free and independent. 

At page 27 of the report of the Philippine Collector 
of Customs for 19 10, a table is given showing the export 
duties subject to refund collected under the Act of 
Congress of March 8, 1902, and deposited in the Philip- 
pine treasury to the credit of the Insular Government 
at the end of each fiscal year (June 30), as follows: 



1902 


$ 71,064.69 


1903 


527,228.10 


1904 


462,433.83 


1905 


486,475.56 


1906 


433,99179 


1907 


433,458.58 


1908 


370,513-36 


1909 


598,917.69 




$3,384,083.60 



Congressional Legislation 



617 



The following table, taken from this same annual 
report of the Collector of Customs of the Philippines 
for 1910 (p. 22) shows the size (weight in kilograms), 
and value, of the annual Philippine hemp crop from 
1899 to 1 9 10, both inclusive. It gives in one set of 
columns the total exported to all countries, and in 
the other the part which comes to the United States: 





To All Countries. 


To United States. 




Kilos 


Value 


Kilos 


Value 


1899 


59,840,368 $ 6,185,293 


23,066,248 $ 2,436,169 


1900 


76,708,936 


11,393,883 


25763728 


3446,Hi 


1901 


112,215,168 


14,453,110 


18,157,952 


2,402,867 


1902 


109,968,792 


15,841,316 


45,526,960 


7,261,459 


1903 


132,241,594 


21,701,575 


71,654,416 


12,314,312 


1904 


131,817,872 


21,794,960 


61,886,592 


10,631,591 


1905 


130,621,024 


22,146,241 


73,351,136 


12,954,515 


1906 


112,165,384 


19,446,769 


62,045,088 


11,168,226 


1907 


114,701,320 


21,085,081 


58,388,504 


11,326,864 


1908 


115,829,080 


17,311,808 


48,813,720 


7,684,000 


1909 


149,991,866 


15,883,577 


79,210,362 


8,534,288 


1910 


170,788,629 


17,404,922 


99,305,102 


10,399,397 



If you have the time and inclination, you can easily 
figure out the annual "rake-off" of the American 
hemp importers from the above table. For instance, 
take the last year, 1910: 99,305,102 kilos at 75 cents per 
100 kilos is $744,788.26, which is more than 4% of 
$17,404,922, the total value of the hemp crop of the 
archipelago for that year. Add this $744,788.26 to the 
$3,384,183.60 shown by the above table of refundable 
duties collected from 1902 to 1909 inclusive, and you 
have over $4,000,000 rebates accruing to American 
importers of Manila hemp from 1902 to 1910 inclusive. 

In his remarks on Section 13 of the Payne Law of 



618 American Occupation of Philippines 

1909 (above set forth), in the House of Representatives, 
May 13, 1909, x Hon. Oscar W. Underwood said, in part : 

When you put a tax on your people for engaging in export 
trade, to that extent you lessen their ability to successfully 
meet their foreign competitor and reduce the territory in 
which they can successfully dispose of their surplus products 
abroad. Our forefathers in writing the Constitution of the 
United States, recognizing the false principle on which an 
export tax was based, put it in the fundamental law of our 
land that the United States Government should not lay 
export taxes. If we enact this law, we write into the statute 
book for the Philippine Islands, legislation which is little short 
of barbarous, legislation that no government in the civilized 
world except Turkey, and Persia, and other second-class 
nations countenance to-day. 

But the hemp interests won out and the section was 
adopted. In an argument for the repeal of the export 
tax, delivered in the House of Representatives August 
19, 191 1, the Philippine delegate, Hon. Manuel L. 
Quezon, said: 

There is one section in the Philippine tariff law, approved 
August 5, 1909, which is seriously injuring the proper com- 
mercial development of the islands. 

Of course the earnestness with which Mr. Quezon 
pleaded his cause may be imagined from the circum- 
stance that, as he says, he is continually advised by 
letters from his people, and verily believes that if the 
export tax is not taken off soon the Philippine hemp 
industry will be entirely destroyed, and the hemp farmers 
will have to take to raising something else in lieu of 
hemp, because the present prices hardly permit them 
to live. In the course of his speech Mr. Quezon offered 

1 Congressional Record, May 13, 1909, p. 2009. 



Congressional Legislation 619 

the following truly eloquent and absolutely unanswer- 
able argument: 

Although it has been decided by the Supreme Court of 
the United States that the provisions of the Constitution 
are not in force in the Philippines, I have serious doubts as 
to whether said decision also meant that this Government 
has the power to enact laws for the islands which are expressly 
prohibited by the Constitution in the United States. 

It is through the courtesy of Mr. Quezon that such 
light as I may have been able to throw on the subject 
has been obtained. He has shown me letters from the 
Philippine Chamber of Commerce at Manila and 
other commercial organizations prophesying ruin to the 
Manila hemp industry in the event the export tax 
should continue. One of these letters is addressed 
to the two Philippine Commissioners in Congress, Mr. 
Legarda and Mr. Quezon. It informs them of the 
hopes of the Filipinos at Manila that they, Messrs. 
Legarda and Quezon, may be successful in their cam- 
paign to get the law repealed and that many of them 
(the Filipinos at Manila) feel hopeful of results in that 
regard. Speaking for their fellow countrymen at 
Manila, they say, ''The optimists are of the opinion 
that the matter being in such good hands as yours will 
be carried to a successful conclusion." Then they 
give the darker side of the picture thus: 

But the representatives at this capital of the famous 
syndicate, the International Harvester Company, are of 
the opinion that we will be able to accomplish nothing, 
and theirs is an opinion to which great weight should be 
attached, because the vast interests which that concern 
represents can set in motion powerful influences to keep the 
present law as it is, since it concerns their interest to do so. 



620 American Occupation of Philippines 

Mr. Quezon has also shown me a letter written to 
him, March 30, 191 1, by his and my warm personal 
friend, Hon. James F. Smith, formerly Governor- Gen- 
eral of the Philippines, now (191 2) Judge of the Court 
of Customs Appeals at Washington, D. C, in which 
letter General Smith says, concerning the operation of 
that part of the export tax act of March 8, 1902 (con- 
tinued by the Payne Tariff Law of 1909) by which 
American manufacturers are relieved from the payment 
of the export tax on Manila hemp : 

In effect this really and truly amounts to the payment by the 
Philippine Government and the Filipino people of a large 
subsidy to American manufacturers of hemp. More than 
that, this concession to the American manufacturer, by en- 
abling him to undersell his British competitor, gives him an 
undue control of the situation and has put him in a position, 
to some extent, to control prices for the raw product. 

It seems to me that the American people had better 
look to their own liberties, when they remember that 
in the campaign for the Republican nomination in 191 2, 
the Roosevelt Headquarters gave out that pending the 
Roosevelt dictation of Mr. Taft's nomination in 1908, 
the International Harvester Company furnished a floor 
of its Chicago building to the Taft people, this inter- 
esting fact being part of the leakage from the Roosevelt- 
Taft quarrel caused by the Roosevelt charge that Mr. 
Taft was unfit for re-election because he "meant well 
feebly ; and when it is recalled, on the other hand, that 
in the Roosevelt campaign of 191 2 for the presidential 
nomination for a third term, Mr. George W. Perkins, 1 

1 Mr. Perkins is chairman of the Finance Committee of the Inter- 
national Harvester Company, a hundred million dollar corporation own- 
ing divers subsidiary companies which make twine and cordage. See 
Moody's Manual. 



Congressional Legislation 621 

the very personification of undue corporation influence 
with the Government, assumed the role of Warwick 
for an ex- President who, when President, had repu- 
diated the advice of his counsel, Governor Harmon, 
that a railroad company 1 be prosecuted for taking 
rebates because the vice-president of the company was his 
personal friend. 2 But let us return to the Philippine 
rebates, and their corner-stone, the export tax, Section 
13 of the Payne- Aldrich Tariff. 

In the case of Fairbanks vs. United States, 181 U. S. 
Supreme Court Reports, page 290, a case in which the 
court was asked to declare a certain Act of Congress 
unconstitutional and void, because it imposed what was 
virtually an export tax, the opinion of the court cites 
the absolute inhibition against such a tax imposed 
by our Federal Constitution, and says concerning the 
wise theory on which this fundamental tenet of our 
government rests: 

The requirement of the Constitution is that exports 
should be free from any governmental burden. 

The decision then goes on to elaborate on what it 
terms ''that freedom from governmental burden in 
the matter of exports which it was the intention of our 
Constitution to protect and preserve." Finally, the 
court uses an expression which is certainly a stinging 
rebuke to any law-making power that permits the 
selfish greed of a little set of importers to get a law 
passed imposing for their special benefit a paralyzing 
export tax on the chief staple of a helpless colony : 

The power to tax is the power to destroy. 

But Mr. Quezon has no vote in Congress and his 
voice was not heard, at least not heeded. 

1 The Atcheson, Topeka & Sante Fe. 2 Paul Morton. 



622 American Occupation of Philippines 

The summation of the whole matter is this: Both 
the Philippine people and the American people are, 
and long have been, suffering from unjust taxation 
through laws for which special selfish financial interests 
in the United States, exercising grossly undue influence 
on governmental action, are responsible. Neither will 
ever get relief until the government of this nation is 
wrested from the control of the money-hogs and restored 
to the people. Until that is done, selfish greed will 
continue to sow sedition in the Philippines, and socialism 
in the United States. 



CHAPTER XXVII 
The Rights of Man 

The rights of man cannot be changed. It is the government which 
attempts to change them that must change. — Webster. 

IT was the homely common sense of Mr. Lincoln 
that first reminded us most vividly how like to the 
sins of an individual are those of a nation. To the 
Southern man who admires Mr. Lincoln as one of the 
great figures of all time, he seems like a great physician, 
who, with malice toward none and with charity for all, 
kept vigil for four years at the bedside of a sick nation 
through all the long agony of its efforts to throw off 
from its system the inherited curse of slavery. Of 
course, human slavery was a relic of barbarism. But 
in fixing the Rights of Man, the founders of the Republic 
actually overlooked the fact that a negro was a human 
being. So that, vast property rights having accrued 
pursuant to that mistake, the march of progress had 
to wipe them out, no matter whom it hurt financially. 
The enormity of the iniquity of human slavery did not 
dawn suddenly and exclusively upon William Lloyd 
Garrison, He is not the sole, original inventor and 
patentee of the idea. Lord Macaulay's father was 
doing the same sort of agitating in England about the 
same time. Westminster Abbey has its monument to 
the elder Macaulay, just as Commonwealth Avenue 
has its monument to the elder Garrison. Simul- 

623 



624 American Occupation of Philippines 

taneous like stirrings occurred elsewhere throughout 
Christendom. But, of course, in America, arguments 
for the emancipation of the slave first took root most 
readily in a thrifty section of our liberty-loving country 
which had nothing to lose by abolition. 

John Quincy Adams once said that our government 
was "an experiment upon the heart of man." It is 
because this government of the people by the people 
for the people was a deliberate and thoughtful attempt 
upon the part of its founders to apply the Golden Rule 
as a doctrine of international and inter-individual law, 
that we believe our form of government is the last hope 
of mankind. It is, as we conceive it, the voice of hu- 
manity raised in protest against the proposition that 
might makes right. It is, as we conceive it, a government 
which entered the lists of the nations as the champion 
of the human mind, in the great struggle of Mind for 
the mastery over Matter, the world-old struggle 
between Good and Evil, Light and Darkness. Our 
government, like everything else, must follow the law of 
its being, or die. Its first great sin in violation of the 
Rights of Man was due to heredity. We inherited the 
institution of slavery, the governmental exception to 
the rule that all men are created with equal right to 
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This was a 
sin against human liberty, one of the "unalienable" 
Rights of Man, upon which the Republic purported 
to be builded. The consequences of that sin are still 
with us; but, except for the occasional bloody-shirt 
waver, whose intellectual resources are not sufficient 
to provide him with a live issue, we are meeting those 
consequences, as a nation, bravely, and with the mutual 
forbearance born of the fact that none are wholly free 
from responsibility for present difficulties. 

Our second great national sin was a yielding to the 



The Rights of Man 625 

temptation of the environment which arose, unforeseen, 
after a splendid war waged for the Rights of Man 
against Spain in Cuba. The Philippine war was waged 
to subjugate the Filipino people, because Mr. McKinley 
believed it would be financially profitable to us to own 
the islands, and in the face of the fact that the only 
thing he knew officially about the Filipino people was 
that Admiral Dewey thought them superior to the Cu- 
bans and more capable of self-government. The war 
in the Philippines was, therefore, a war against the 
Rights of Man. Nowhere in any state paper has any 
American statesman, soldier, or sailor, had the temerity 
to invoke the name of God in connection with the 
retention of the Philippine Islands. Nowhere in any 
American state paper connected with the Philippines is 
there any reference to "a decent respect to the opinions 
of mankind." The sin of our Philippine policy is 
that it is a denial of the right of a people to pursue 
happiness in their own way instead of in somebody 
else's way. It is a denial of the very principles in 
maintenance of which we went to war against Spain 
to free Cuba, as we had previously gone to war against 
England to free ourselves. 

Now the reason the nation blundered into taking the 
Philippines was that it believed the Filipinos to be, 
not a people, but a jumble of savage tribes. But the 
reason the men who controlled the action of the govern- 
ment at the time took the Philippines was because 
they believed they would pay. Nevertheless, there 
was a sufficient number of our fellow-citizens — con- 
trolled, some by altruistic motives and some by sordid 
motives — to cause the nation to follow the lead of 
those then in control. If the men then in control had 
taken the people into their confidence, the blunder 
would never have been made. If the correspondence 
40 



626 American Occupation of Philippines 

between Mr. McKinley and the Paris Peace Commis- 
sion in the fall of 1898, from which the injunction of 
secrecy was not removed until 1901, had been given out 
at the time, the treaty would never have been ratified 
except after some such declaration as to the Philippines 
as was made concerning Cuba, some reaffirmance of 
allegiance to faith in our cardinal tenet — the right of 
every people to pursue happiness in their own way, 
free from alien domination. The Bacon resolution 
of 1899, which was along this line, was defeated only 
by the deciding vote of the presiding officer, the Vice- 
President of the United States. The passage of that 
resolution would have prevented the Philippine In- 
surrection. Had it passed, the Filipinos would no 
more have had occasion to think of insurrection than 
the Cubans did. It was Mr. McKinley alone who 
decided to take the Philippines. Congress was not 
called together in extra session. The people were not 
consulted, except from the rear-end of an observation 
car. 

Most people, whether they be lawyers or not, are 
more or less acquainted with the doctrine of what is 
called in law a "bona fide purchaser without notice." 
No man can claim to be a bona fide purchaser without 
notice, when he knows enough about the subject matter 
of his purchase to put him on reasonable notice of the 
existence of facts which, had he taken the trouble to 
verify them, would have caused him to halt and not 
purchase. The correspondence in 1898, made public 
in 1 90 1, withheld by Mr. McKinley until after his 
second election in 1900, is sufficient to have made any 
honest man ask himself some such question as this: 
''After all, is it not quite possible that those people can 
run a decent government of their own? Admiral 
Dewey says they are superior to the Cubans. " But 



The Rights of Man 627 

Mr. McKinley did not pursue this inquiry, as it was his 
duty to do. He took the islands because he believed 
they would pay, knowing nothing in particular about 
the Filipinos, except what he had learned from Admiral 
Dewey's brief comment, yet hoping in spite of it that 
they would turn out sufficiently unfit for self-government 
for the event to vindicate the purchase. To demon- 
strate that the Filipinos were wholly unfit for the treat- 
ment accorded the Cubans was the only possible 
justification of the initial departure from the traditions 
of the Republic and from the principles which were its 
corner-stone. And he made the departure because 
the business "interests" of the country then believed 
— erroneously they all now admit — that it would pay. 
He decided to treat eternal principles as "worn-out 
formulae." Senator Hoar once declined an invitation 
extended by his own city of Worcester, to deliver a 
eulogy on Mr. McKinley, because of his Philippine 
policy. True, he tempers the asperity of this action 
thus: "It was not because I was behind any other 
man in admiration or personal affection for that lofty 
and beautiful character. But * * * if a great Catholic 
prelate were to die, his eulogy should not be pronounced 
by a Protestant." 1 But all Senator Hoar's speeches 
against the McKinley Philippine policy were as em- 
phatic as Luther's ninety-five theses. He was in posses- 
sion at the time, along with the rest of the Senate, of the 
correspondence with the Paris Peace Commission made 
public after the presidential election of 1900. 

Ever since Mr. McKinley took the Philippines, it 
has been the awkward but inexorable duty of the de- 
fenders of that good man's fame to deprecate Filipino 
capacity for self-government. President Taft's chief 
life-work since this century began has been to take 

1 Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. ii., p. 317. 



628 American Occupation of Philippines 

care of his martyred predecessor's fame, by proving 
that Mr. McKinley guessed right in 1898 when he 
bought the Philippines and trusted to luck to be able 
to make out, in spite of what Admiral Dewey had said, 
a case sufficiently derogatory to Filipino intelligence 
to justify the purchase and subjugation of the islands 
at the very time we were freeing Cuba. Obviously, 
then, the more utterly unfit for self-government in the 
present or the near future Mr. Taft can make the 
Filipinos out, the nearer he gets to vindicating the 
memory of Mr. McKinley, that is, with men of his own, 
(Mr. Taft's) high character. He insists on treating as 
children a people who got up a well-armed army of thirty- 
odd thousand men in three or four months and held at 
bay, for two years and a half, some 125,000 husky 
American soldiers, over five times as many as it took 
to drive Spain from the Western hemisphere. Physical 
force is the basis of all government among men. If 
President Taft had anything of the soldier instinct of 
his immediate predecessor, he would not sniff dema- 
goguery in the proposition that military efficiency is 
a better guaranty of capacity for self-government than 
all the school-books in the world, and that proven 
passionate willingness to die for freedom from alien 
domination is the best guaranty conceivable against 
internecine strife. It was a tremendous struggle with 
his own conscience that Mr. McKinley went through 
with before he decided to repudiate the principles on 
which we took Cuba in order, for a money consideration 
euphemistically called " trade expansion," to take the 
Philippines. He had advices before him at the time 
making it reasonably certain that this meant trouble 
with the Filipinos, i.e., bloodshed in the Philippines, 
the extent of which none could foresee, and about which 
he was of course apprehensive. In the matter of in- 



The Rights of Man 629 

structing our Paris Peace Commissioners to insist on 
Spain's ceding us the Philippines, Mr. McKinley took 
no moral ground tenable like a rock, such as truly 
great men take in great crises of their country's history. 
He did not attempt to lead the people. He simply 
decided that it would be a popular thing to do to take 
the islands. Fresh from a war entered upon to eman- 
cipate the Cubans from alien domination, he took a 
step which both Admiral Dewey and General Merritt 
warned him beforehand would probaby mean war — 
to subjugate, against their will, a people superior to 
the Cubans. And in taking this step, he took into his 
confidence, neither the people who paid for the war, 
nor the soldiers who fought it. To deny that his 
motives were benevolent would be simply stupid. 
But he followed the mob which shouted from the rear- 
end of his observation car and repeated by cable to 
the Paris Peace Commission, what the mob yelled. 
Ever since the supposed Philippine Klondyke whispered 
in President McKinley 's ear "Eat of the imperial 
fruits of a colonial policy, " the archives of this govern- 
ment — the reports of the State, War, and Navy Depart- 
ments, and the Congressional Documents — have reeked 
with the inevitable consequences of our fall from our 
high estate. No man can serve two masters. Phil- 
anthropy for pecuniary profit is a paradox. Duplicity 
ever follows deviation from principle. In our dealings 
in 1898 with Aguinaldo you find vacillation on the part 
of military commanders who personally did not know 
what fear was, and embarrassed hypocrisy in dealing 
with him on the part of men wearing the shoulder-straps 
of the American army, athwart the frankness of whose 
gaze no such shadow had ever fallen before. You 
find systematic concealment of our intentions in dealing 
with the insurgents, for fear they would insurge before 



630 American Occupation of Philippines 

the Treaty was signed, and thus cause such a revulsion 
of feeling in our country against the purchase of theirs 
as to defeat the ratification of the treaty. After that 
you find a systematic minimizing of the opposition to 
our rule, reinforced by subtle depreciation of Filipino 
intelligence, and backed up by a ' ' peace-at-any-price " 
policy, periodically punctuated by the horrors of war 
without its dignity. The denial of Filipino opposition 
to our rule, which opposition means merely a natural 
longing for freedom from alien rule, has gradually been 
abandoned. Nobody now clings to that stale fiction. 
Also, a long course of chastening, through reconcentra- 
tion and kindred severities subsequent to the official 
announcement of a state of general peace, has at last 
gotten the situation as to public order well in hand. 
The only question for those who affect that "decent 
respect to the opinions of mankind" which the men of 
1776 had in mind is," Are the Filipinos a people?" 
President Taft was originally with Senator Hoar on 
the Philippine question. At least he was an "anti- 
expansionist." In all the heat of subsequent con- 
troversy he has never made bold to deny the general 
proposition of the unalienable right of every people to 
liberty and the pursuit of happiness in their own way. 
His position is that the Filipino people must be made an 
exception to the rule because they are not a people. 
This is the strongest I can state his proposition for him. 
It is very difficult to state even with apparent plausi- 
bility, anything which denies the right of every com- 
munity of people to immunity from alien domination. 
The case must be an extreme one. The issue which 
the writer raises with the President's policy is that the 
Filipinos are a people. 

I know of no graver responsibility that an American 
statesman can take upon himself before the bar of 



The Rights of Man 631 

history than to deny the right of any given people to 
self-government. Certainly any man who denies that 
right at least assumes the burden of proof that they are 
unfit to attend to their own affairs. Mr. McKinley 
assumed it without pretending to know anything much 
about the Filipinos, the motive being that the Islands 
would be profitable to us. When Mr. Taft went to 
the Philippines in 1900, he went, not to investigate 
the correctness of Mr. McKinley's assumption, which 
was implied in the purchase, but to champion it; not 
to give advice concerning the righteousness of having 
taken over the Philippines, but to bolster up the policy. 
He assumed the burden of proof before he knew 
anything about the facts. The burden has been 
on him ever since. Any subordinate who helps him 
to bear that burden, finds favor in his eyes. But the 
burden is greater than he can bear. The proof fails. 
The proof shows that the Filipino people ought to be 
allowed to pursue happiness in their own way instead 
of being made to pursue it in Mr. Taft's way. Once 
you pretend that our true object in the Philippines is 
the "pursuit of happiness" for them, The Taft policy 
is condemned by the facts ; and that is why I am opposed 
to it. The record shows this. He admits it. But he 
insists, with a sigh, that in some other generation they 
will be happy. Meantime, we are drifting toward our 
next war carrying in tow 8,000,000 of human beings 
who, if neutralized and let alone would not be disturbed 
by our next war, but whose destinies now must be 
dependent upon the outcome of such war, however 
little they may be concerned in the issues which bring 
it about. 

The shifty opportunism which once actually held 
out to the Filipinos the hope of some day becoming 
a State of the United States of America, has long since 



632 American Occupation of Philippines 

lapsed into the silence of shame, because no American 
ever honestly believed that the American people would 
ever countenance any such preposterous proposition. 
And so a free republic based on representative govern- 
ment is face to face with the proposition of having a 
"crown colony" on its hands which wishes to be, and 
could soon be made fit to be, a free republic also. 

If a federal republic cannot live half slave and half 
free, can it live with millions of the governed denied a 
voice in the federal government confessedly forever? 



CHAPTER XXVIII 
The Road to Autonomy 

Oh be ye not dismayed 

Though ye stumbled and ye strayed. 

Kipling— A Song of the English. 

HE who points out a wrong without being prepared 
to suggest a remedy presumes upon the patience 
of his neighbor without good and sufficient cause. Up 
to this point the wrong has been unfolded, with such 
ability as was vouchsafed the narrator, "from Genesis 
to Revelations," so to speak; also his own attitude as 
an eye-witness, and its evolution from the Mosaic 
doctrine of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, 
to the more Christian doctrines of the New Testament. 
Let us now consider the remedy. 

In the course of our travels with the army in the 
earlier chapters of this book, we first followed its 
northern advance, from Manila over the great central 
plain drained by the Rio Grande and crossed by the 
railroad connecting Manila Bay with Lingayen Gulf; 
its further advance from the northern borders of the 
plain over the mountains of Central Luzon; and its 
march from the central mountains to the northern sea, 
at the extreme northern end of the archipelago. We 
thus saw in detail the military conquest and occupation 
of that part of Luzon lying north of the Pasig River. 
Before leaving that part of the subject, the way the 

633 



634 American Occupation of Philippines 

provinces thus occupied were grouped into military 
districts was indicated. Following the lines of the 
military occupation, it was shown that Northern Luzon 
was naturally and conveniently susceptible of division 
into four groups of provinces, which groups might 
ultimately be evolved into self-governing common- 
wealths — States of a Philippine Federal Union, as 
follows : 



Name of State 


Area (sq. m.) 


Population 


Ilocos 1 


6,500 


650,000 


Cagayan 2 


12,000 


300,000 


Pangasinan 3 


4>5oo 


625,000 


Pampamga 4 


5,000 


650,000 


Total 


28,000 


2,225,000 



It will be remembered that after our narrative had 
followed the occupation of Northern Luzon by the 
American forces to practical completion, we turned to 
that part of Luzon lying south of Manila, and followed 
the military occupation as it was gradually extended 
from the Pasig River to the extreme point of Southern 
Luzon. Before closing the review of that military 
panorama, suggestions were made for an ultimate 
grouping of the provinces of Southern Luzon into two 
governmental units intended to be ultimately evolved 
into states. Those suggestions contemplated grouping 
the provinces of the lake region bordering on the 
Laguna de Bay and the adjacent provinces, into a 
territory designated for convenience as Cavite. s This 
territory was to include all of Southern Luzon except 
the hemp peninsula, which lies to the south of the Lake 

1 P. 252, ante. 2 P. 255. 3 p. 258. « p p . 258-9. 

s The name is immaterial, but the grouping is convenient and prac- 
ticable, though not the only grouping practicable. 



The Road to Autonomy 635 

country. It was also suggested in the same connection 
that the three provinces of the hemp peninsula might 
form a convenient ultimate State of Camarines. In 
other words, two states can be made out of Southern 
Luzon as follows : 

Name of State Area (sq. m.) Population 

Cavite 8,500 700,000 

Camarines 7,000 600,000 



Total 15,500 1,300,000 

To recapitulate: All of Luzon except Manila and 
the vicinity can at once be divided into the six groups 
of provinces above mentioned — " territories, " having 
what we are accustomed in the United States to call 
a "territorial form of government," and intended to 
be made states later. Luzon is about the size of Cuba 
(a little over 40,000 sq. miles), is twice as thickly 
populated (nearly 4,000,000 to Cuba's 2,000,000), and 
is not cursed with a negro question, as Cuba is. 

The above totals, be it remembered, are only round 
numbers, but they get us "out of the woods" so to 
speak, and away from a lot of unpronounceable names. 
They show you how to handle Luzon as if it were about 
the size of Ohio — which it is. And, as has already been 
made clear in the earlier part of this volume, Luzon 
"is" the Philippines, in a very suggestive sense of 
the phrase, since it contains half the land area of the 
archipelago (outside of the Mohammedan island of 
Mindanao), and half the total population of the whole 
archipelago, besides being eight or ten times as large 
as any other island of the group except Mindanao; 
and it also contains the city which is the capital and 
chief port of the archipelago, and has been the seat of 



636 American Occupation of Philippines 

government for over three hundred years — Manila. 
And Manila is eight or ten times as large as any other 
town in the archipelago. 

After the occupation of Luzon, General Otis' s exten- 
sion of our occupation to the Visayan islands was 
reviewed, and in that connection it was pointed out 
that each of the six largest of those islands to wit, 
Panay, Negros, Cebu, Leyte, Samar, Bohol, might be 
ultimately evolved into six states. 1 

The smaller islands lying between Luzon and Min- 
danao could easily be disposed of governmentally by 
being attached to the jurisdiction of one of the said 
six islands. 

There is to-day no reason why a dozen Americans 
could not be at once appointed governors of the twelve 
prospective autonomous commonwealths above in- 
dicated, just as the President of the United States has 
in the past appointed governors for New Mexico, 
Arizona, and other territories of the United States 
which have subsequently been admitted to the Union. 
If the Congress of the United States should promise the 
Filipinos independence, to be granted as soon as Ameri- 
can authority in the Islands should so recommend, the 
dozen territorial governments intended to be evolved 
into states of an ultimate federal union could soon be 
whipped into shape where they could take care of 
themselves to the extent that our state governments 
to-day take care of themselves. American represen- 
tatives of American authority in the Islands, sent out 
to work out such a programme, might be instructed to 
watch these twelve territorial governments, granting 
to each the right to elect a governor in lieu of the 
appointed governor as soon as in their judgment a 
given territory was worthy of it. I have no doubt 

1 See p. 267, ante. 



The Road to Autonomy 637 

that such recommendations would follow successively 
as to all of said prospective states inside of four or five 
years. Whether this plan is wise or not, it certainly 
is not, as far as I am concerned, "half baked." Some 
five years ago, in the North American Review, 1 - I sug- 
gested that Luzon could be so organized within less 
than ten years by American territorial governors se- 
lected for the work, naming the Honorable George Curry 
of New Mexico, formerly Governor of the territory of 
New Mexico, and now a member of Congress there- 
from, as an ideal man to organize one such territory. 
It is true that there are not eleven other men as well 
qualified for the work as Governor Curry. In fact he 
is probably better qualified for the work than any man 
living. The language used as to Governor Curry in 
the North American Review article referred to was as 
follows : 

If the inhabitants of these regions were told by a man 
whom they liked and would believe, as they would Curry, 
that they were to have autonomous governments like one 
of the Western Territories of the United States, at the very 
earliest possible moment, and urged to get ready for it, 
they could and would, under his guidance. We would get 
a co-operation from those people we do not now get and 
never will get, so long as we keep them in uncertainty as 
to what we are going to do with them. If next year we 
should formally disclaim intention to retain the islands 
permanently, and set to work to create autonomous Terri- 
tories destined ultimately to be States of a Federated Philip- 
pine Republic, whenever fit, we would soon see the way out 
of this tangle, and behold the beginning of the end of it. 

Whenever the twelve territorial governments should 
be gotten into smooth working order under elected 

1 For June 21, 1907. 



638 American Occupation of Philippines 

native governors, the Philippine archipelago would 
then be nearly ready for independence, so far as its 
internal affairs are concerned. The danger of their 
being annexed on the first pretext by some one of the 
great land-grabbing powers should be met by our 
guaranteeing them their independence, as we do Cuba, 
until they could be protected by neutralization treaties, 
such as protect Belgium and Switzerland to-day, as 
explained in the chapter which follows this. Powers 
not specifically granted to the several states-in-embryo 
should of course, until the final grant of independence, 
be reserved to the central government at Manila. 
Manila and Rizal province would be available at almost 
any time as a thirteenth state. So that when the 
twelve states above suggested had shown themselves 
capable of local self-government, Manila and Rizal 
province might be added to make the final one of thir- 
teen original states of a Philippine Republic. 

Any American who has seen a Filipino pueblo trans- 
formed, as if by magic, from listless apathy to a state 
of buzzing and busy enthusiasm suggestive of a bee- 
hive, by preparations for some church fiesta, or for 
the coming of some dignitary from Manila, has seen 
something analogous to what would happen if the 
Filipino body politic should suddenly be electrified by a 
promise of independence under some such programme 
as the above. A generous rivalry would at once ensue 
all over the archipelago in each of the twelve prospective 
states. Each would seek to be the first to be recom- 
mended by American authority as ready for statehood. 
I do not believe the annals of national experience 
contain any analogy where every member of a given 
community has rallied to a common cause more com- 
pletely than the whole Filipino people would rally to 
such a prospective programme of independence. The 



The Road to Autonomy 639 

unanimity would be as absolute as the kind we saw 
among the American people at the outbreak of the 
Spanish War, when Congress one fine morning placed 
fifty millions of dollars at the disposal of President 
McKinley by a unanimous vote. 

I especially invite attention to the fact that the 
above programme throws away nothing that has been 
done by us in the Islands in the last twelve years in the 
way of organization. It simply takes it and builds 
upon it. Congress should not attempt to work out 
the details from this end of the line. We should send 
men out there from here to work them out, with local 
co-operation from the leading Filipinos. Men animated 
by the idea of working out a programme under which 
the living may hope to see the independence of their coun- 
try, should be sent out to take the place of the men now 
there who are irrevocably committed to the programme 
of indefinite retention with undeclared intention, which 
holds out no hope to the living. It is not wise to ar- 
range the details of the programme by act of Congress 
without a year or two of study of the situation by such 
men on the ground. An act of Congress which goes into 
details before getting the recommendations of such men 
will inevitably set up a lot of straw men easy for the 
other side to knock down. All you need is a program, 
sanctioned by Congress, containing a promise of inde- 
pendence, and men sent out to the islands to work out 
the program. They would report back from time to 
time, and the Congress by whose authority they went 
out would have no hesitation in being guided by their 
recommendations. If unpatriotic greed for office among 
the Filipinos, or other opposition an mated by evil 
motives, should block the game, your Americans so 
sent out would have to recommend the calling of a 
halt. This ever-present shadow in the background 



640 American Occupation of Philippines 

would in turn throw the shadow of ostracism over all 
demagogues. 

Meantime the Filipinos should be given a Senate, 
or upper house, in which the thirteen prospective 
" states" should be represented by two men, the bill 
therefor to be framed out there, and sent back here 
to Congress for approval. This would give them under 
the plan here suggested, as soon as the Americans sent 
out should so recommend, a Senate of twenty-six 
members. At present, if the native Assembly, or 
lower house, does not pass the annual appropriations 
necessary to run the government, the appropriation 
act of the preceding year again becomes law. At 
present, the upper house is the Philippine Commission. 
By withholding its consent, it can prevent any legis- 
lation whatsoever. So, at present, the Assembly is 
little more than a debating society. All questions as 
to appropriations, veto of legislation, and other details, 
in the event the Filipinos are given a Senate also, should 
be left to be fixed in the bill recommended by the men 
sent out to work out the program of promise. 

On March 20, 19 12, Honorable W. A. Jones, the 
distinguished veteran Congressman from Virginia, who 
is Chairman of the Committee on Insular Affairs, 
introduced in the House of Representatives a bill 
entitled "A bill to establish a qualified independence 
for the Philippines, and to fix the date when such 
qualified independence shall become absolute and com- 
plete. " The greater part of what precedes this para- 
graph of this chapter was written prior to March 20, 
1912. Mr. Jones's bill works out the details of the 
independence problem in a manner somewhat different 
from the plan I suggest, but that does not make me 
any the less heartily in favor of the principle which 
his bill embodies, The supreme virtue of the Jones 



The Road to Autonomy 641 

bill is that it promises Independence at a fixed date, 
July 4, 1 92 1. It ends the cruel uncertainty, so unjust 
to both the Filipinos and to the Americans in the Philip- 
pines, that is contained in the present program of 
indefinite retention with undeclared intention. Five 
years ago, in the North American Review for January 
18, and June 21, 1907, the writer hereof expressed the 
belief that an earlier date was feasible, thus : 

If three strong and able men, familiar with insular con- 
ditions, and still young enough to undertake the task 1 
were told by a President of the United States, by authority 
of the Congress, "Go out there and set up a respectable 
native government in ten years, and then come away," 
they could and would do it, and that government would be 
a success ; and one of the greatest moral victories in the annals 
of free government would have been written by the gentle- 
men concerned upon the pages of their country's history. 

As Mr. Jones's bill allows four years more of time, 
I believe it to be absolutely safe. 

Governor Curry, the Congressman from New Mexico 
hereinabove mentioned, who spent eight years in the 
Philippines, agrees with the fundamental principle 
of the Jones bill, that as to making a definite promise 

1 In the article quoted from I named three men, adding "or any three 
men of like calibre." One of the three was Justice Adam C. Carson, 
of the Philippine Supreme Court, who has been a member of the Philip- 
pine Judiciary since the Taft Civil Government was founded in 1901. 
If this book has gained for me any character in the estimation of any 
reader who is or may hereafter be clothed with authority, I desire to 
say here, on the very highest public grounds, that, in my judgment, 
Judge Carson is the most considerable man we have out there now 
(19 12) — a good man to have in an emergency. Though not as learned 
in the law as his colleague, Justice Johnson — who is quite the equal, 
as a jurist, of most of the Federal judges I know in the United States, 
Judge Carson is a man of great breadth of view, and is peculiarly en- 
dowed with capacity to handle men and situations effectively and 
patriotically. 
41 



642 American Occupation of Philippines 

of Independence within a few years, and does not con- 
sider 192 1 too early. 

Under the present law, the Philippine Assembly 
has some eighty members, each supposed to represent 
90,000 people, more or less. This tallies, roughly, 
with the census total of population, which is 7,600,000. * 
Under the existing law in the Philippines, the qualifi- 
cations for voting are really of two kinds, though nomi- 
nally of three kinds. There is a property qualification, 
and there is an educational qualification. In any case, 
in order to vote, the individual must be twenty-one 
years old, and must have lived for six months in the 
place where he offers to vote. The property qualifi- 
cation requires that the would-be voter own at least 
$250 worth of property, or pay a tax to the amount of 
$15. The explanation of how a man may not own 
$250 worth of property and yet pay $15 taxes is that un- 
der the old Spanish system, which we partially adopted, 
a man might pay such cedula or poll-tax as he preferred, 
according to a graduated scale, certain civic rights being 
accorded to those voluntarily paying the higher poll- 
tax which were denied to those paying less. The 
educational qualification requires the would-be voter 
to speak, read, and write either English or Spanish, 
or else to have held certain enumerated small municipal 
offices under the Spaniards — before the American 
occupation. Mr. Jones's bill proposes to add the 

1 Says the census of the Philippines of 1903, vol. ii., p. 15: "The 
total population of the Philippine Archipelago on March 2, 1903, was 
7,635,426. Of this number, 6,987,686 enjoyed a considerable degree 
of civilization, while the remainder, 647,740, consisted of wild people." 
By this same Census, the Moros are classified as uncivilized, and the 
population of the island on which they live, Mindanao, is given at about 
500,000 (499,634, vol. ii., p. 126), of which about half only (252,940) are 
Moros, the rest being civilized. The total of the uncivilized people of 
the archipelago, according to the Census, is 647,740 (vol. ii., p. 123), 
less than 400,000, leaving out the Moros. 



The Road to Autonomy 643 

speaking, reading, and writing of the native dialect of 
a given locality 1 to the educational qualification. 
This would double, or perhaps triple, the electorate, 
and would, in my judgment, be wise. Thousands 
upon thousands of natives who only speak a little 
Spanish can both speak, read, and write their native 
Tagalo, Ilocano, or Visayan, as the case may be. The 
total of those qualified to vote for members of the 
Assembly in 1907 was only about 100,000. At a 
later election, that number was doubled. If there are 
7,500,000 people in the archipelago, one fifth of these 
should represent the adult male population , say 1 , 500 ,000. 
Under Mr. Jones's bill, the electorate would probably 
increase to half a million long before the date he pro- 
poses for independence, July 4, 1921. But all such 
details as qualification for voting might, it seems to 
me, be left to people on the ground, their recommen- 
dations controlling. Under a promise of independence 
by 1 92 1, a very fair electorate of at least one third, 
possibly one half, of the adult male population, could 
be built up. As the majority report on the Jones 
Bill, dated April 26, 191 2, says: 

For nearly ten years the average public-school enrol- 
ment has not been less than 500,000. 2 

1 Tagalo, Ilocano, and Visayan are the three main dialects that have 
been evolved into written language by the patience of the Spanish 
priests in the last couple of hundred years or so. Probably five sixths 
of the people of the archipelago speak some one of these three dialects. 
In fact they can hardly be called "dialects," for there are plenty of 
books — novels, plays, grammars, histories, dictionaries, etc. — written 
in Tagalo, Ilocano, or Visayan. Every educated Filipino of the well- 
to-do classes grows up speaking Spanish and the dialect of his native 
province, while the latter is the only language spoken by the less fortunate 
people of his neighborhood, the poorer classes. 

2 This report is numbered Report 606, 626. Cong., 2d Sess., and ac- 
companies H. R. 22143 (the Jones Bill). 



644 American Occupation of Philippines 

I believe that the Moros should be left as they are 
for the present. The time for solving that problem 
has not yet been reached. Mr. Jones himself evidently 
bases his idea of allowing the Moro country represen- 
tation in the Philippine Congress, or legislature pro- 
vided by his bill, on the probability that enough 
Christian people will vote, down there, to make up an 
electorate that would not be "impossible, " i.e., absurd. 
For instance, he tells me that a great many people have 
moved into Mindanao from the northern islands for 
commercial reasons, and, if I recollect correctly, that 
Zamboanga, the most beautiful little port in Min- 
danao, which hardly had 10,000 people when I was 
there, now has possibly 50,000. But the Moro question 
need not stand in the way of setting up an independent 
government in the Philippines in 1 921, as proposed by 
his bill. You have material for thirteen original states, 
representing a population of nearly seven million 
Christian people, in Luzon and the six main Visayan 
Islands. Why delay the creation of this republic on 
account of 250,000 semi-civilized, crudely Mohamme- 
dan Moros in Mindanao — a separate island lying off 
to the south of the proposed republic? 1 A happy 
solution of the matter would be to send Mr. Jones out 
there as Governor-General and let him work out the 
problem on the ground. He has had a long and dis- 
tinguished career in the public service, twenty-two 
years in Congress. His public record and speeches on 
the Philippine question from the beginning would 
make him to the Filipinos the very incarnation of a 
bona fide intention on our part to give them their inde- 

1 According to the American Census of the Philippines, of 1903, the 
total population of Mindanao is 499,634 (see vol. ii., p. 126), of which 
252,940 are Moros, and the rest civilized. In addition to said 252,940 
Moros on Mindanao, the adjacent islets contain some 25,000 Moros. 



The Road to Autonomy 645 

pendence at the earliest practical moment, that is, 
at some time which the living might hope to see. When 
Governor Taft and Mr. Root drew the Philippine 
Government Act of 1902, the former had already been 
president of the Philippine Commission for two years, 
had been all over the archipelago, and knew it well. 
Suppose the Taft policy should be substituted by the 
more progressive Jones policy. Mr. Jones, or who- 
ever is to change the policy, ought to have as much 
acquaintance with the subject, acquired on the ground, 
as Mr. Taft had when he formulated his policy of 
indefinite retention with undeclared intention. The 
nucleus of the Taft policy was stated by Governor 
Taft to the Senate Committee in 1902, as follows 1 : 

My own judgment is that the best policy, if a policy is 
to be declared at all, is to declare the intention of the United 
States to hold the islands indefinitely, until the people 
shall show themselves fit for self-government, under a 
gradually increasing popular government, when their 
relation to the United States, either of statehood, or of 
quasi-independence, like the colony of Australia or Canada, 
can be declared after mutual conference. 

The policy which Mr. Jones has favored for the last 
twelve years is almost as well known to the Filipinos 
as are the views of Mr. Taft himself. 

In conclusion, the writer desires to say, with especial 
emphasis, that the suggestions outlining the plan 
which forms the bulk of this chapter are presented in a 
spirit of entire deference to the views of any one else 
who may have considered this great subject carefully, 
especially to the views of Mr. Jones, whose bill is so 
entirely right in principle. The one supreme need of 
the situation is a definite legislative declaration which 

1 See Senate Document 331, 1902, p. 339. 



646 American Occupation of Philippines 

shall make clear to all concerned — to the Filipino 
demagogue and the American grafter, as well as to the 
great body of the good people of both races out there — 
that the governing of a remote and alien people is to 
have no permanent place in the purposes of our national 
life ; and that we do bona fide intend to give the Fili- 
pinos their independence at a date in the future which 
will interest the living, by extending to the living the 
hope to see the independence of their country, And 
the Jones Bill does that. 



CHAPTER XXIX 
The Way Out 

Respect for the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland has now taken 
such lodgment in the conscience of Europe that its violation would in- 
evitably provoke a storm of indignation. 

M. De Martens in the Revue des Deux Mondes. 

ON March 25, 1912, Honorable W. A. Jones, of 
Virginia, Chairman of the House Committee on 
Insular Affairs, introduced a resolution (H. J. 2/8) 
proposing the neutralization of the Philippines, to 
accompany his Philippine Independence Bill discussed 
in the preceding chapter. Such a resolution, accom- 
panying such a bill, both introduced by one of the 
majority leaders in the House of Representatives, lifts 
the question of Philippine neutralization out of the 
region of the "academic," and brings it forward as a 
thing which must, sooner or later, command the serious 
consideration both of Congress and the country. There 
have been many such resolutions before that of Mr. 
Jones. But they are all the same in principle. All 
contemplate our guaranteeing the Filipinos their inde- 
pendence until the treaties they propose shall be 
consummated. In 191 1, there were at least nine such 
resolutions proposing neutralization of the Philippines, 
introduced by the following named gentlemen, the first 
a Republican, the rest Democrats: 

Mr. McCall, of Massachusetts; Mr. Cline, of Indiana; 

647 



648 American Occupation of Philippines 

Mr. Sabath, of Illinois; Mr. Garner, of Texas; Mr. 
Peters, of Massachusetts; Mr. Martin, of Colorado; 
Mr. Burgess, of Texas; Mr. Oldfield, of Arkansas; and 
Mr. Ferris, of Oklahoma. 

Because the neutralization plan to provide against 
the Philippines being annexed by some other Power 
in case we ever give them their independence would, 
if successfully worked out, reduce by that much the 
possible area of war, and be a distinct step in the 
direction of universal peace, it is certainly worthy of 
careful consideration by the enlightened judgment of 
the Congress and the world. 

Mr. McCall is the father of the neutralization idea, 
so far as the House of Representatives is concerned, 
application of it to the Philippines having been first 
suggested at the Universal Peace Conference of 1904, 
by Mr. Erving Winslow, of Boston. Mr. McCall has 
been introducing his neutralization resolution at every 
Congress for a number of Congresses past. 

The McCall Resolution (H. J. Res. ioj) is the oldest, 
and perhaps the simplest, of the various pending reso- 
lutions for the neutralization of the Philippines, and is 
typical of all. It reads : 

JOINT RESOLUTION 

Declaring the purpose of the United States to recognize 
the independence of the Filipino people as soon as a stable 
government can be established, and requesting the President 
to open negotiations for the neutralization of the Philippine 
Islands. 

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the 
United States of America in Congress assembled: 

That in accordance with the principles upon which its 
government is founded and which were again asserted by it 
at the outbreak of the war with Spain, the United States 



The Way Out 649 

declares that the Filipino people of right ought to be free 
and independent, and announces its purpose to recognize 
their independence as soon as a stable government, repub- 
lican in form, can be established by them, and thereupon 
to transfer to such government all its rights in the Philip- 
pine Islands upon terms which shall be reasonable and just, 
and to leave the sovereignty and control of their country to 
the Filipino people. 

Resolved, That the President of the United States be, 
and he hereby is, requested to open negotiations with such 
foreign Powers as in his opinion should be parties to the 
compact for the neutralization of the Philippine Islands by 
international agreement. 

If the McCall Resolution, or any one of the kindred 
resolutions, were passed, and complied with by the 
President of the United States, and accepted by the 
other Powers, and the Filipinos were helped to organize 
territorial governments such as Arizona and New 
Mexico were before they became States, several such 
territories could form the nucleus about which to 
begin to build at once, as indicated in the chapter on 
"The Road to Autonomy." A number of such terri- 
tories could be made at once as completely autonomous 
as the governments of the territories of Arizona and 
New Mexico were before their admission to our Union. 
With those examples to emulate, together with the 
tingling of the general blood that would follow a promise 
of independence and a national life of their own, similar 
territorial governments could be successively organized, 
as indicated in the preceding chapter, throughout the 
archipelago. These could, in less than ten years, be 
fitted for admission to a federal union of autonomous 
territories, with the string of our sovereignty still tied 
to it, and an American Governor- General still over 
the whole, as now. And when the last island knocked 



650 American Occupation of Philippines 

for admission and was admitted, the string could be 
cut, and the Federal Union of Territories admitted, 
through our good offices, to the sisterhood of nations, 
as an independent Philippine republic. They would 
not bother the rest of the world any more than Bel- 
gium and Switzerland do, which are likewise protected 
by neutralization. 

The idea of international neutralization is not with- 
out pride of ancestry or hope of posterity. It was born 
out of the downfall of Napoleon I. The Treaty of 
Paris of 1815 declared that 

the neutrality and inviolability of Switzerland, as well as 
its independence of outside influences, are in conformity 
with the true interests of European politics. 

The Congress of Vienna, held afterwards in the same 
year, at which there were present, besides the various 
monarchs, such men as Wellington, Talleyrand, and 
Metternich, solemnly and finally reiterated that decla- 
ration. Would not "the neutrality and inviolability" 
of the Philippines be gladly acceded to by the great 
Powers as being "in conformity with the true interests 
of European politics, " and Asiatic politics as well? 

Says M. De Martens, in an article in the Revue des 
Deux Mondes for November 15, 1903: 

Respect for the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland has 
now taken such lodgment in the conscience of the civilized 
nations of Europe that its violation would inevitably provoke 
a storm of indignation. 

At present, the Philippines are a potential apple of 
discord thrown into the Balance of Power in the Pacific. 
The present policy of indefinite retention by us, with 
undeclared intention, leaves everybody guessing, in- 



The Way Out 651 

eluding ourselves. Now is the accepted time, while 
the horizon of the future is absolutely cloudless, to ask 
Japan to sign a treaty agreeing not to annex the Philip- 
pine Islands after we give them their independence. 
By her answer she will show her hand. The over- 
crowded monarchies do not pretend any special scruples 
about annexing anything annexable. Germany very 
frankly insists that she became a great Power too late 
to get her rightful share of the earth's surface, and that 
she must expand somewhither. And only the virile 
menace of the Monroe Doctrine has so far stayed her 
heavy hand from seizing some portion of South America. 
But probably none of the Powers would object to con- 
verting the Philippines into permanently neutral terri- 
tory, by the same kind of an agreement that protects 
Switzerland. 

The Treaty of London of 1831, relative to Belgium 
and Holland, declares: 

Within the limits indicated, Belgium shall form an inde- 
pendent and perpetually neutral state. She shall be required 
to observe this same neutrality toward all the other states. 

The signatories to this treaty were Great Britain, 
France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Forty years 
after it was made, during the Franco-Prussian war, 
when Belgium's neutrality was threatened by mani- 
festations of intention on the part both of France and 
of Prussia to occupy some of her territory, England 
served notice on both parties to the conflict that if 
either violated the territorial integrity of Belgium, 
she, England, would join forces with the other. And 
the treaty was observed. The specific way in which 
observance of it was compassed was this : Great 
Britain made representations to both France and 



652 American Occupation of Philippines 

Germany which resulted in two identical conventions, 
signed in August, 1870, at Paris and Berlin, whereby 
any act of aggression by either against Belgium was 
to be followed by England's joining forces with the 
other against the aggressor. So long as human nature 
does not change very materially, "the green-eyed 
monster " will remain a powerful factor in human affairs. 
The mutual jealousy of the Powers will always be the 
saving grace, in troubled times, of neutralization treaties 
signed in time of profound peace. If "Balance of 
Power" considerations in Europe have protected the 
Turkish Empire from annexation or dismemberment all 
these years, without a neutralization treaty, why will 
not the mutual jealousy of the Powers insure the 
signing and faithful observance of a treaty tending 
to preserve the Balance of Power in the Pacific? Who 
would object? 

The Panama Canal is to be opened in 1913. We 
want South America to be a real friend to the Monroe 
Doctrine, which she certainly is not enthusiastic about 
now, and will never be while we remain wedded to the 
McKinley Doctrine of Benevolent Assimilation of 
un consenting people — people anxious to develop, under 
God, along their own lines. In 1906, while Secretary 
of State of the United States, Mr. Root made a tour 
of South America. He told those people down there, 
at Rio Janeiro, by way of quieting their fears lest we 
may some day be moved to "improve" their condition 
also, through benevolent assimilation and vigorous 
application of the "uplift" treatment: 

We wish for * * * no territory except our own. We 
deem the independence and equal rights of the smallest 
and weakest member of the family of nations entitled to as 
much respect as those of the greatest empire, and we deem 



The Way Out 653 

the observance of that respect the chief guaranty of the 
weak against the oppression of the strong. 

That Rio Janeiro speech of Mr. Root's is as noble a 
masterpiece of real eloquence, its setting and all con- 
sidered, as any utterance of any statesman of modern 
times. Among other things, he said: 

No student of our times can fail to see that not America 
alone but the whole civilized world is swinging away from 
its old governmental moorings and intrusting the fate of 
its civilization to the capacity of the popular mass to govern. 
By this pathway mankind is to travel, whithersoever it 
leads. Upon the success of this, our great undertaking, the 
hope of humanity depends. 

As Secretary of War, " civilizing with a Krag, " Mr. 
Root reminds one of Cortez and Pizarro. As Secretary 
of State, he permits us to believe that all the great men 
are not dead yet. 

If, in making that Rio Janeiro speech, Mr. Root laid 
to his soul the flattering unction that the minds of his 
hearers did not revert dubiously to his previous grim 
missionary work in the Philippines, where the percen- 
tage of literacy is superior to that of more than one 
Latin-Amerxan republic, he is very much mistaken. 
If he is laboring under any such delusion, let him read a 
book written since then by a distinguished South Ameri- 
can publicist, called El Porvenir de La Americana 
Latina ( ' ' The Future of Latin America ' ') . If he does no t 
read Spanish, he can divine the contents of the book 
from the cartoon which adorns the title-page. The 
cartoon represents the American eagle, flag in claw, 
standing on the map of North America, looking toward 
South America as if ready for flight, its beak bent over 
Panama, the shadow of its wings already darkening 



654 American Occupation of Philippines 

the northern portions of the sister continent to the 
south of us. To get the trade of South America, in 
the mighty struggle for commercial supremacy which 
is to follow the opening of the Panama Canal, we must 
win the confidence of South America. We will never 
do it until we do the right thing by the Filipinos. Con- 
cerning the Philippines, South America reflects that we 
annexed the first supposedly rich non-contiguous 
Spanish country we ever had a chance to annex that 
we had not previously solemnly vowed we would not 
annex. We must choose between the Monroe Doctrine 
of mutually respectful Fraternal Relation, which con- 
templates some twenty-one mutually trustful repub- 
lics in the Western Hemisphere, all a unit against 
alien colonization here, and the McKinley Doctrine of 
grossly patronizing Benevolent Assimilation, which 
contemplates some 8,000,000 of people in the Eastern 
Hemisphere, all a unit against alien colonization 
there — a people, moreover, whose friendship we have 
cultivated with the Gatling gun and the gallows, and 
watered with tariff and other legislation enacted without 
knowledge and used without shame. 

We should stop running a kindergarten for adults in 
Asia, and get back to the Monroe Doctrine. There 
are only two hemispheres to a sphere, and our manifest 
destiny lies in the Western one. We do not want the 
earth. Our mission as a nation is to conserve the 
republican form of government, and the consent-of- 
the-governed principle, and to promote the general 
peace of mankind by insuring it in our half of the earth. 
The first thing to do to set this country right again is 
to get rid of the Philippines, and give them a square 
deal, pursuant to the spirit of the neutralization reso- 
lutions now pending before Congress. All these 
resolutions contain the one supreme need of the hour, 



The Way Out 655 

an honest declaration of intention. The longer we 
fight shy of that, the less likely we are ever to give the 
Filipinos their independence, and the deeper we get 
into the mire of mistaken philanthropy and covert 
exploitation. 

We should resume our original programme of blazing 
out the path and making clear the way up which any 
nation of the earth may follow when it will. That 
path lies along the line of actually attempting as a 
nation a practical demonstration of the Power of 
Righteousness, or, in other words, the existence of an 
Omnipotent Omniscient Benevolent Good (whether 
you spell it with one or with two is not important) 
shaping, guiding, and directing human affairs, such 
demonstration to be made through the concerted action 
of a self-governing people under a written Constitution 
based on equality of opportunity and the Golden Rule. 

As a people we are very young yet. It is not yet 
written in the Book of Time how long this nation will 
survive. So far, our government is only an experiment. 
But, as John Quincy Adams once said, it and its Con- 
stitution are "an experiment upon the human heart/' 
to see whether or not the Golden Rule will work in 
government among men. 



INDEX 



(Ph. = Philippines or Philippine, according to context. Pop. = population.) 



Abra province, 252 

Adjutant- General Cor bin, cablegrams 
of 1899 to Otis, 2ii, 306 

Agriculture, wealth of Ph. is in, 607; 
Sugar Trust, Tobacco Trust, Hemp 
Trust, and Ph. sugar, tobacco, and 
hemp, 560-1, 565, 569-70; 604- 
622 

Aguinaldo, personal equation of, 5» 240; 
present demeanor 6; early dealings 
with Consul Pratt, 7-15; and Wild- 
man, 19; with Admiral Dewey, 16-45; 
with General Anderson, 46-66; with 
Merritt, 67-87; with Otis, 88-106, 
164-185; escape through our lines, 
November, 1899, 246; capture, 190 1, 
332-9; takes oath of allegiance, 340; 
issues proclamation, 341 

Albay province, area and pop., 265; 
insurrection of 1902-3 in, 423-436 

Alger, R. A., resigns as Secretary of War, 
222 

Allen, H. T., General, on constabulary 
loyalty, 403; on Samar situation in 
1904, 480-1, 488; in 1906, 517 

Ambos Camarines, see Camarines 

American governors of Ph., 1 898-191 2, 
list of, 558 

American imperialism contrasted with 
British, 127, 449 

"American Ireland," why make Ph., 508 

American troops, total in Ph., February 
4, 1899, 186; total employed in Ph. 
insurrection, 316; cost of, to-day, 
600 

Amigo, campaign meaning of, 201, 242 

Anderson, T. M., General, dealings with 
Aguinaldo, 46-66 

Angeles, MacArthur's advance from, 
238 

" Anti-expansionist, ' ' Eighth Army Corps 
overwhelmingly so, 192, 199 

Archipelago, Ph., geography simplified, 
228 

Aringay fight, 119 



Army songs of Ph.: under Otis, 186; 

under MacArthur, 270; under Chaffee, 

392 
Army, Taft belittling of work of, 299; 

annual cost of, in Ph., to-day, 600-03 
Army and Navy Journal, 569 
Arnold, Commander, U. S. N., 236 
Arnold, J. R., on Ph. Civil Service, 

587-590 
Aryat, Lawton's advance from, 234 
Assembly, Philippine, opening of, 550; 

address of Secretary Taft, 552 
Autonomy, road to, 633-646 

Bacon, A. 0., speech in Senate, January 
18, 1899, 163; resolution of 1899, 
175-7; vote on, 178-9; letter to author 
1 8 1-2; attitude about Bell and Ba- 
tangas, 393 

Bacoor, convention of, Aug. 6, 1898, 
71-2; insurgent capital moved from, 
to Malolos, 95-6 

Balangiga massacre, 377 

Bandholtz, Col., Albay insurrection, 
423-5 

Barcelon vs. Baker, 511-12, 534 et seq. 

Barrett, John, on Malolos congress, 
103-4 

Barry, T. H., General, letter to Secre- 
tary Root, 334 

Bass, John F., war correspondent, on 
insurgent campaign against Manila, 
May-July, 1898, 82; on Iloilo fiasco, 
153. 157; on MacArthur's advance on 
Caloocan, 195-8; signer of round 
robin, 219, 221 

Bataan province, area and pop. 256 

Batangas province, area and pop. 263; 
insurrection of, 1901-02 in, 371 et 
seq.; 384 et seq.; losses by the war, 
597-8 

Batchelor, J. B., Captain, overruns Ca- 
gayan valley, 253-4 

Bates, J. C, General, First Division, 
Eighth Corps, succeeding Lawton, 260 



42 



657 



6.s8 



Index 



Batson, Matthew A., Major, wounded 
at Aringay, 119. 246 

Bayambang, council of war, 241-2 

Belgium, neutralization of, 651 

Bell, J. F., General, estimate of Agui- 
naldo, 5; report, August, 1898, 74, 
142; in advance on Caloocan, 197; 
Colonel 36th Vol. Inf., 237; in Bat- 
angas, 386 et seq. 

Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, 
139-151; a Pandora Box, 151; Otis's 
doctoring of, 164, 191; Aguinaldo's 
counter-proclamation, 169; Filipinos 
in 1898 like Canadians in 1911, 284-5 

Benguet province, area and pop. 252 

Biac-na-Bato, treaty of, 3 

Bifiang fight, 261 

Bishop, Wm. H., Major, charges against 
considered, 200-202 

Bitterness, of war, 198-205; 299 

"Black Hole of" Albay, 501 

"Blame of those ye better," policy, 448 

Bliss, C. N., Sec'yof Interior, sends geo- 
logist to Ph., 48 

Blount, J. H., with Maccabebe scouts, 
235, 261; army to bench, 361; cochero 
incident, 366; Justice of Peace incident, 
368; Ola incident, 435; resignation as 
judge, 499 

Blunder of taking Ph., admitted by 
Taft, 44, 291 

Bohol, area, pop. etc., 228; disturb- 
ances of 1901-2, 371 el seq; proposed 
state of, 267, 636 

"Boss, Am I the," 186 

Boutelle, Lieut., killed in action, 235 

Bowers, Lieut., testimony on Samar 
massacres, 458; wounded, 516 

Bray, Mr., of Singapore, 4 

Brent, C. H., Bishop, 580 et seq. 

Bryan, W. J., position on Treaty of 
Paris, 130; on Filipino capacity for 
self-government, 296-7 

Bulacan province, area and pop. 233 

Burgess neutralization resolution, 648 

Burke, on " Conciliation with America," 
revised, 323 

Butt, A. W., Major, 76 

Caducoy, Juliano, Samar brigand, 456-7 

Cagayan, province, area and pop. 255; 
proposed State of, 255, 634 

Cailles, Juan, General, assassination 
orders, 314; surrender, 341 

Calderon, Lieut., list of Samar mas- 
sacres of 1904, 460-7 



California regiment earns laurels, Feb'y 
4-5, 1899, 193 

Caloocan, advance on, 195; capture, 207 

Calumpit, capture of, by Mac Arthur, 
212; Funston's river-crossing incident, 
212 

Camarines, province, area and pop. 265; 
proposed State of, 265-6, 635 

Campaign songs of Ph.: under Otis, 
186; under MacArthur, 270; under 
Chaffee, 392 

Capacity for self-government, of Fili- 
pinos: Gen. Chas. King on, 273; 
Dewey on, 41; Bass, J. F., on, 82; 
Barrett, John, on, 103; Dr. Heiser on 
104; author's views, 105; Wilcox and 
Sargent's 120; Gen. Merritt's, 190; 
Mr. Bryan's, 296 

Capital punishment, author's views on, 
320-24 

Capture of Aguinaldo, 332-9 

Carabao Society, 278 

Carabaos, destruction of 90%, 399 

Carnegie, Andrew, Roosevelt-Taft sup- 
per-table confession to, about Ph., 
612-13 

Carpet-bag feature of Taft civil govern- 
ment, 304 

Carson, A. C, army to bench, 361; call 
on author, 502; estimate of, 641 

Carter, W. H., General, and Samar, in 
1904, 454. 465, 506-7 

Cartoon, Filipino, of 1899, 191-2 

Casiguran Bay, 335 

Castner, Joseph, Lieut., 253 

Catholic Church in Ph., 134; Taft and, 
563 

Cavite, province, area and pop. 263; 
proposed State of, 263-4, 635 

Cebu, area and pop. 228; disturb- 
ances of 1901-2 in, 371; proposed 
state of, 267, 636 

Censorship of press, Otis's, 219; round 
robin, 220 

Chaffee, A. R., General, reprimanded 
by Roosevelt, 376; differences with 
Taft, 377 

Chapelle, Archbishop, opinion of Otis, 
88; on the $20,000,000, 133-4 

Chase, Captain, 247 

Church property in Ph., 134; Taft and, 
563 

Civil government of 1901, prematurity 
of, 300; general view of, 362 

Civil Service of Ph., 473. 587 

Cleveland Grover, on Ph., 183 



Index 



659 



Cline neutralization resolution, 647 
Coghlan, Capt. U. S. N., capture of 

Spanish garrison at Olongapo, 44 
Collins, Robert, war correspondent, 

round robin incident, 219 
"Colonization, we blundered into,'' 

Taft, 44, 291; apotheosis of, 486-490 
Commerce, 604 et seq. 
Commission, Philippine: Schurman, 31, 

171, 217; Taft, 282-344 
Congressional legislation, 604-622 
Constabulary, early uncertainty about, 

403 ; inadequacy of, 404 
Copra, 607 

Corbin, Adjutant-General, on "impa- 
tience of the [American] people" in 

1899, 211, 306 
Correspondents, war, round robin, 219 
Cost of living in Ph., 588-590 
Cost of Ph., annual now, 600; total, in 

life and money, 595 et seq. 
Crowder, E. H., Lieut.-Col., 158, 201 
Currency, 522, 565 
Curry, George, 413, 508, 515, 637 

Davis, C. K., Peace Commissioner, 122 

Davis, O. K., war correspondent, quoted 
82; signs round robin, 219 

Day, Wm.R., Peace Commissioner, 122; 
position, 134 

Declaration of Independence, Aguinal- 
do's, 38; Bacoor convention, 71 

Defencelessness of Philippines, 565 

Denby, Charles, 273-5 

Denver Post's Japanese proposition, 161 

Department [military] of Northern 
Luzon, Districts of, 252 et seq.; of 
Southern Luzon, 263-5 

Despotism, Ph. Government a benevo- 
lent, 439-41 

De Veyra, Jaime, 505 

Dewey, George, Admiral, original tele- 
gram to Aguinaldo, 7; at Hong 
Kong before battle of Manila Bay, 
16; the battle, 16; subsequent dealings 
with Aguinaldo, 20 et seq.; cablegram 
about Filipino superiority to Cubans, 
41; position against annexation of 
Ph., 45, 125; issue with Aguinaldo, 
189 

Dingley Act, 605, 608, 611, 615 

Dodd, Captain, 247 

Dubois, Senator, Taft party of 1905. 
356-7_ 

Education, 566, 643 



Edwards, Clarence R., Colonel, cons- 
picuous gallantry in early fighting, 
210; desk general since, 211; admits 
Ph. indefensible, 565 

Eight Army Corps, overwhelmingly 
against annexing Ph., 192, 198 

Ethnological homogeneity of Filipinos, 
295, 298, 318 

Europe's smiles of 1 899-1900, 289 

Exploitation, Filipino apprehensions, 
183; constant American pressure for, 
559 

Export tax, constitutionality of, ques- 
tioned, 619, 621; depressing effect on 
hemp industry, 604 et seq. 

Family life of Filipinos, 491 

February 4, 1899, battle of, 193 

Feito, Governor of Samar, 1904, during 

the massacres, 461-2 
Fergusson, A. W., on Winthrop appoint- 
ment, 443; on Ph. Civil Service, 590-3; 
death, 593 
Ferris neutralization resolution, 648 
Filipinos, traits in peace and war, 185; 
hospitality, 119; calibre of educated, 
103 
First Expedition to Ph., McKinley on, 

46-7 
Forbes, Gov. 558-570 
Freedom re-defined, 304-5 
Friar lands, Governor Taft and, 563-4 
Frye, Wm. P., Peace Commissioner, 122; 

position 132-3 
Funston, Frederick, General, crosses 
river under fire, 212; captures Agui- 
naldo, 332-9 

Garner neutralization resolution, 648 

Geography of Ph., 225-8 

Gilmore, Lieut., U. S. N., capture, 257; 
rescue, 247 

Governors of Ph., American, 1898-1912, 
list of, 558; their great power, 439 

Gray, George, Peace Commissioner, 
122; position, 129, 135 

Green, Jimmie (American "Tommy 
Atkins"), sentiments in 1898, at 
Manila, about "expansion," 172 

Guerrilla warfare decreed by insur- 
gents, 242; tactics described, 310 

Guzman case, 1 13-14 

Hannay, Lieut., 248 
Hardin, E. E., Col., 266 
Hardwick, T. W., M. C, 482 



66o 



Index 



Hare, L. R., Col., 237 

Harvester Trust, 561-2, 570, 610-11, 619 

Harvey, G. R. Ass't Atty. Gen., 469- 
70, 479-483 

"Hate," etc., policy, 448 

Hazzard, Captain, 334 

Hazzard, Lieut., 334 

Heat prostrations of 1899, 208-9 

Heidt, G. V., Lieut., 248 

Heiser, Dr., on Ph. Assembly, 104 

Hemp, Governor Forbes's reticence 
about, 561; Congressional legislation 
concerning, 604 et seq.; American 
corner on, 611-12 

Hierarchy, Ph. official, imperious influ- 
ence, 439 et seq. 

Higgins, R. R. manager, 101 

Hoar, Senator, interview with McKinley, 
145; declines deliver eulogy on, 627 

Home life of Filipinos, 491 

Homogeneity of Ph. people: Taft on, 
295; American census on, 298; Mac- 
Arthur on, 318. See 133 

Hong Kong Junta, minutes of, May 4, 
1898, 25, 96-7 

Howland, C. R., Captain, 238 

Howze, R. L., Lt.-Col., 247 

Hughes, General, 186 

Humor, Filipino, cartoon, 19 1-2 

Ickis, W. H., army to bench, 361 

Ide, H. C, certain statements by, exam- 
ined, 469, 477-9, 486-7; succeeds 
Gov. Wright, 515; resigns, 521; esti- 
mate of, 522 

Igorottes, 575-6 

Ilocanos, "Yankees of" Ph., 247 

Ilocos, proposed State of, 252-3, 634 

Uocos Norte area and pop. 252 

Ilocos Sur area and pop. 252 

Iloilo fiasco, 152-163 

Iloilo speech of Governor Taft, 1903, 
437-8 

Imperialism, American and British, 
compared, 127, 449 

Independence, Declaration of, Agui- 
naldo's first formal, 38; Bacoor con- 
vention, 7 1 ; ante-bellum minutes of 
Hong Kong Junta, 25 

Insurrection proper, 1899-1901, 186- 
344; of 1901-2, 371-402; of 1903, 
409 et seq.; of 1904, 452 et seq.; of 1905, 
506 et seq.; Leyte disorders of 1906, 
518 et seq. 

International Harvester Company, 607, 
610, 619-20 



Iowa, 51st, at Iloilo, 155 

Isabela province, area and pop. 255 

Japan and the Philippines, 328-331 
Jellyby, Mrs., Uncle Sam as, 358 
Johnson, Justice, 641 
Joint High Parleying Board, Otis's, 

173 et seq. 
Jones, Captain, wounded, 516 
Jones Independence Bill, 640 et seq. 
Jones neutralization resolution, 647 
Judiciary, Ph., its greatest need, 572 

Katipunan Society, 113 

Kenly, W. L., Lieut., 214 

Kidd, Benj., 486 

Kindness, Taft ideas on, 304 

King, Charles, General, views, 273 

King, Edw. L., Lieut., 244 

Kipling, R., 486 

Knox, Commander, U. S. N., 236 

"Lack of a common language" fetich, 

298 
Laguna province, area and population, 

263; disturbances of 1901-2, 372; of 

1905, 509 

Lands, Friar, see Friar lands 

Language, lack of a common, discussed, 
298 

Lawton, H. W., General, arrives, 209; 
Laguna expedition, 210; "this ac- 
cursed war," 211; Northern advance, 
234; good-bye to Young, 239; killed, 
306 

Legarda, B. Ph. delegate in Congress, 619 

Legislation, Congressional, 604-622 

Lepanto-Bontoc, area and pop. 252 

LeRoy, James, on Taft, 438 

Leyte, area and pop. 228; disorders of 

1906, 518; proposed state of, 267, 636 
Lingayen Gulf expedition, 234-6 
Locusts, 608 

Lodge, H. C, on Treaty of Paris, 130; 
Aguinaldo jest, 239; "Trade Expan- 
sion" speech, 275; on SpanishWar, 27, 
276; on chronic disorder in Cuba, 343 

Logan, Major, killed, 238 

London Times, May 5, 1898, 35 

Long, Secretary, cautions Dewey, 98 

Lopez, "Presidente" etc., 154 

Lowry, E. G., 600 

Luna, Captain, drowned, 244 

Luzon, preponderating importance, 225; 
central plain, 232; wild tribes, 232; 
size, 362 



Index 



661 



MacArthur and the war, 270 et seq. 

MacArthur, General: on Aguinaldo and 
Filipinos, 23, 309; advance on Ca- 
loocan, 195, 207; up R. R., 234; 
differences with Taft, 307, 382; on 
conditions of 1900-1, 310 et seq.; 
drastic proclamation, 323-5; final 
advice, 355 

McCall neutralization resolution, 648 

McCutcheon, John T., war correspond- 
ent, round robin, 219; Binang fight, 
261 

McKinley, President, Cuban message 
of 1897, 2, 27; war message of i898 > 
27; Aguinaldo's letter to, 36; cable to 
Dewey of Aug, 13, 41; annual mes- 
sage of 1898, 47, 216; instructions to 
Merritt, 50; to Peace Commissioners, 
98, 122 et seq.; Benevolent Assimila- 
tion Proclamation, 139-151; text of, 
147; its reception at Iloilo, 156; at 
Manila, 164 et seq.; message of 1899, 
188-9; Taft commission foreshadowed 
in, 287; instructions to, 359, 405, 421, 
476 

Maccabebe scouts, writer detailed to t 
235; their allegiance analyzed, 333; 
used to capture Aguinaldo, 334 

Magtaon fight, 516 

Maine, U. S. S., blown up, 3 

Malabon landing party episode, 209 

Malolos, insurgent capital, 95-6; Con- 
gress of, 99-102; capture, 208 

Man, rights of, 623-632 

Manila, siege of, 13 et seq.: fall of, 83-7; 
importance of, 225-6 

Manila-Dagupan Railway, Higgins 
claim, 10 1 

Manufactures 607 

Map of archipelago, see end of volume 

March, P. C, Major, 238 

Mark Tapley, Taft as, 355 

Martin neutralization resolution, 648 

Masbate, area and pop., 228 

Mascardo surrenders, 341 

Massacre of Americans at Manila, 
"plot" considered, 199 

Melliza, R., at Iloilo, 159 

Merritt, Wesley, General, 46; instruc- 
tions, 50-2; double-dealing, 78; 
"juggling," 81; receives surrender 
Manila, 67, 86; advice at Paris, 127; 
complimentary estimate of Filipinos, 
190 

Miller, M. P., General, Iloilo expedi- 
tion, 152-163 



Millet, F. D., war correspondent, on 
insurgent siege of Manila, 67-9; on 
Greene's "juggling," 80-1; on inau- 
guration of Malolos government, 99 
Mindanao, area and pop., 229; distinct 

problem, 230-1 
Mindoro, area and pop., 228 
Mining, 607 

Misamis, insurrection of 1902-3, 422-3 
Missionary vote in U. S., darkest thing 

ahead of Ph. independence, 580 
Mitchell, Lieut., 334 
Monroe doctrine and Ph., 602, 654 
Moore, Commander, U.S.N., 236 
Moros, 230-1; 567-9; 577; 583; 644 
Municipal governments, dual, de- 
scribed, 316-18 
Mustin, H. C, Ensign, 236 

Nazro, Lieutenant- Commander, 236 

Negroes, Filipinos not, 364-5 

Negros, area and pop., 228; proposed 

state of, 267, 636 
Neutralization — the "way out," 647; 

history of, 650; pending resolutions 

proposing, 648 
Newlands, F. G., Senator, quoted 356-7. 

610 
Newspapers: round robin of 1899, 220; 

present subtle censorship, 440 
Newton, H. W., Captain, 334 
Ninth Infantry, Balangiga massacre, 

377 
Northern Luzon (military) "Depart- 
ment of," Districts of, 252-8 
Nueva Ecija, area and pop., 233 
Nueva Vizcaya, area and pop., 255 

Ohio, size of Luzon, 232 
Ola, Simeon, 423 et seq., 436 
Oldfield neutralization resolution, 648 
Olongapo garrison, surrender of, 58 
Otis and the war: Feb. to fall, 1899, 
186-223; thence to May, 1900, 224- 
269 
Otis, E. S., General, quoted, 30; succeeds 
Merritt, 88; Chapelle's estimate of 
him, 88; writer's, 89; ante-bellum 
dealings with Aguinaldo, 88-106, 164 
et seq. 
Outbreak of February 4, 1899. 186 

Palanan, Aguinaldo captured at, 336-8 
Pampanga province, area and pop., 233 
Panama Canal horoscoped, 652 
Panay island, area and pop., 228; pro- 
posed state of, 267, 636 



662 



Index 



Pandora Box, Benevolent Assimilation 

policy proves, 150-1 
Pangasinan province, area and pop., 

233 
Paragua, 228 

Paris Peace Commission, 122; negotia- 
tions, 121-138 
Paris, Treaty of, 1 21-138 
Parker, Alton B., controversy of 1904 

with Taft, 483 
Parker, James, Lieut.-Col., 248 
Patriotism of Filipinos, 185, 190, 297 
Payne Law of 1909, 615 
Peace protocol, 121; treaty, 1 21-138 
Perkins, G. W., 620-1 
Peters neutralization resolution, 648 
Phelan, H. DuR., 159-162 
Philippine archipelago, geography sim- 
plified, 225-8 
Philippine Assembly, opening of, 550; 

address of Secretary Taft, 552 
Philippine Civil Service, 473. 587 et seq. 
Philippine Government Act, 587 
"Philippines for Filipinos, ' ' Taft policy, 

437; Iloilo speech, 437~8 
Pilar, Gregorio, General, death and 

burial, 248-9 
Placido, Hilario Tal, 336-8 
Policy, Taft, Ph., stated, 645 
Political expediency, controlling factor 

in Ph. affairs, 448 et seq. 
Pratt, Spencer, U. S. Consul General 

at Singapore, dealings with Aguinaldo 

4-iS 
Press, censorship of, by Otis, 220; war 

correspondents, round robin, 220-1 ; 

virtual censorship now, 440 
Protocol, peace, 121 

Public opinion in Ph., negligible, 442-3 
Public order, not finally established 

until 1906, 522 
Purpose of U. S., uncertainty as to, 174- 

175 
Putnam, G.R., count of Ph. Islands, 227 

Quezon, Manuel L., Ph. delegate in 
Congress, speech against export tax, 
618-19 

Quinlan, D. P., Aringay fight, 246; 
buries Gregorio Pilar, 249 

Race friction between Filipinos and 
Americans, 438; increased by Taft 
policy, 439, 447; deplored by Gov. 
Smith, 493; social equality muddle, 
554 etseq. 



Rebate system under export tax, 
iniquities of, 616 et seq. 

Reconcentration in Batangas, 1902, 388 

Reconcentration Law, 416-422 

Reconstruction days in Ph., 288-9, 
381-2 

Refund of export tax, 616 

Reid, Whitelaw, Peace Commissioner, 
122; position, 132; $20,000,000 hint, 
136-7 

"Rid of Philippines," Roosevelt-Taft 
private confession to Carnegie of 
desire to be, 612-14 

Rights of Man, 623-632 

Rios, Montero, at Paris, 136 

Road to Autonomy, 633-646 

Roosevelt, T., Vice-President, crass 
ignorance of 1900 about Filipinos, 
10, 230; presidential amnesty pro- 
clamation of 1902, 312, 375, 397-8; 
opinion of Taft in 1901, 406; hypo- 
thetical interview, 409-414; supper- 
table confession to Andrew Carnegie 
about Ph., 612-13 

Root, Elihu, Secretary of War, ignorance 
of 1899, and uncandor of 1900, 188, 
243. 327. 33i. 413; succeeds Alger, 
223-4; political buncombe of 1900 and 
public admission of 1904, 279-280; 
Rio Janeiro speech, 652-3; intellect- 
ual greatness, 224 

Round robin of war correspondents, 
219-222 

Sabath neutralization resolution, 648 
Samar, U. S. S., off San Fabian, 236 
Samar, area and pop., 228; in 1901-2, 

372 et seq., 452; massacres of 1904, 

453~498; disturbances of 1905-6, 

503-8. See also, 267, 636 
Sandico, alleged massacre order of, 200. 
San Fernando, de Pampanga, 212; de 

Union, taken by Young and his 

cavalry, 246 
San Isidro taken by Lawton, 235 
San Juanico strait, described, 452 
Sargent, L. R., Naval Cadet, trip through 

Luzon, 107-120; on Igorrote exhibi- 
tions, 574 
Schools, number of children in, 566, 643 
Schurman Commission, 31, 171, 217; 

Otis's impatience with, 218 
Schwan, Theodore, General, "South 

line" expedition, Jan-Feb. 1900, 260 

et seq. 
Scouts, Philippine, annual cost, now, 600 



Index 



663 



Sewall, Captain, 209, 245 

Shanks, Governor of Cavite, 539 

Singapore, Pratt and Aguinaldo at, 7 
et seq. 

Slayden, J. L., M. C, 585. 599 

Smith, General Jacob, Samar campaign, 
1901-2, 378-9; made scapegoat, 380 

Smith, James F., Col., First Californians 
made brigadier, 193-4; army to bench, 
361; succeeds Gov. Ide, 524; peace 
certificate of 1907, 525 et seq.; resigns 
556; letter on hemp iniquity of Payne 
law, 620 

Social life of American colony, 440 

Songs, Philippine campaign: under Otis, 
186; under MacArthur, 270; under 
Chaffee, 392 

Sonnichsen, Albert, 247 

Sorsogon province, area and pop., 
265 

Spanish War, President McKinley's 
message of winter of 1897, preceding, 
2; war message, April 1898, 27; peace 
protocol, 121; treaty, 1 21-138 

Spenlow and Jorkins, Taft and Chaffee 
likened to, 390 

Spooner, Senator, 169 

Starr, C. G., Major, 210, 235 

Stewart, Senator, 27 

Sugar and tobacco, Ph., under Payne 
law, 560; other Congressional legisla- 
tion concerning, 604 et seq. 

Supper-table confession of Roosevelt 
and Taft to Carnegie about Ph., 
612-13 

Surigao insurrection of 1903, 414-16 

Switzerland, neutralization of, 650 

Taft W. H., "we blundered into colo- 
nization," 44, 291; original reluctance 
to go to Ph., 291; Roosevelt-Taft 
confession to Carnegie of desire to be 
"rid of " Ph., 612-13; Taft commission 
of 1900, genesis of idea of, 288; 
situation on its arrival at Manila, 
282-7; its initial attitude, 291-4; 
belittles work of army, 299; insists 
enemy friendly, 301-5; ignores army 
views, 306; "peace at any price" 
policy, 307; Governor, 1901-2, 345- 
402; prematurity of civil government, 
360; disorders which followed, 371- 
402; last year as Governor, 1903, 
403-445; Surigao disorders, 414-16; 
reconcentration law, 416-422; Misamis 
insurrection, 422-3; Albay "reign of 



terror," 423-5; magnitude and details 
of, 426-9; "Black Hole of" Albay, 
430-4; Taft unpopularity with Ameri- 
cans in Ph., explained, 437; Iloilo 
speech, 438; "bullyragging" Ameri- 
cans, 439; absoluteness of his power, 
439-445; becomes Secretary of War, 
446 ; St. Louis speech, 1907, 357 ; opens 
Ph. Assembly, 1907, 550; address, 
552; Friar lands, splendid work in 
matter of, 563; likewise as to Ph. 
finances, 565; and public education, 
566 
Tariff Act of 1902, export tax features, 

605 et seq. 
Tarlac, MacArthur enters, 239 
Tarlac province, area and pop., 233 
Tayabas province, area and pop., 263; 

disorders in, 190 1-2, 372 
Taylor, J. R. M., Captain, 200 
Taylor, Wallace C, Colonel, 516 
Tila pass, battle of, 248 
Tillman, Senator, 169 
Tino, General, surrenders, 341 
Tobacco, Congressional legislation con- 
cerning, 604 et seq. 
Trade, 604 et seq. 
Treaty of Paris, 121-138; how we came 

to pay the $20,000,000, 136-8 
"Tribes" and tribal state fetich, 295-8, 

566-9, 575-81 
Twenty-ninth Inf., U. S. V., 266 

Underwood, Oscar W., 286; speech 

against Philippine export tax, 618 
Union province, area and pop., 252 

Vanderlip, F. A., position on Ph., in 

1898, 49, 123 
Vigan, 247 
Villa Simeon, 1 12-15; diary of Aguin- 

aldo's flight, 240, 246 
Visayan Islands, 228; seditious state in 

1905, 505 
Volunteers of 1898, 194; of 1899. 270-8, 

280 

War with Filipinos, progressive bitter- 
ness of, 198 et seq. 

"Water-cure," 202-5 

Way out, the, 647 et seq. 

Wealth of Ph. agricultural, 607 

Wheaton, General, 234-8 

White man, tropics, effect on, 208-9, 
549, 590-3 

Whitsett, G. P., 361 



664 



Index 



Wilcox-Sargent trip, 107-120 
Wild tribes, 295-8, 566-9, 575-581 
Wildman, U. S. Consul, Hong Kong, 

early dealings with Aguinaldo, 19 
Williams, U. S. Consul, Manila, 29, 34, 

77-78, 345 
Wilfley, Atty. Gen., 114, 502 
Winship, B., Lieut., 76 
Winship, Emory, Lieut., U. S. N., off 

Malabon, 207 
Winslow, Erving, 648 
Winthrop, Beekman, 443 



Wood, General, 288 
Worcester, D. C, 571 et seq. 
Wright, Luke, E., Governor: 1904, 445- 
498; 1905, 499-514 

"Yankees of Philippines," Ilocanos so 

called 247 
Young, R. W., Major, 212 
Young, General, 235 et seq., 251 

Zambales province, area and pop., 256 
Zapote River, battle of, 213-14 



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SKETCH MAP 

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THE PHILIPPINES 

DRAWN TO ACCOMPANY 
"THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION 
OF THE PHILIPPINES" 
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